They collected up the last bits of wood they wanted, and went out to the road to choose what they wanted from the pile. Sadie asked everyone to carry one of the trunk sections – small enough logs in the grand scheme of things, only about a foot or so long and 6” in diameter. Then she made a bundle of straight, thick sticks for her projects and Akari somehow bundled up a mess of sticks and twigs that were decidedly not straight. Finding herself the only one without an extra bundle of wood, Danielle decided to bring a collection of the more bent branch segments that were too thick to be tinder but not thick enough to feel like proper logs.

  They got moving down the road back to the ruined town. “All right,” Danielle said, “I promised you a full account of my level-up, so we’ll still all be on the same page about what everyone can do. So. First there’s the stuff that actually hit before the level – mana burst stuff, I guess. You already know about getting Combat Medic as a Career Skill, but I also got a Skill from my other Career – Academy Student, it went first – a Skill for Computer Lore. It has to be something my System was working on before we were Sent. Anyway, then there were notices that Speed Improvement and Mana Deflector were ready to level up as soon as my base level went up.”

  Danielle realized that she was pushing the pace without realizing it. She tried to relax and slow down. “When I selected the option to activate my level, it had me choose a Skill and a Trait. I took Lesser Expand Volume for my Skill, which we’ve already talked about, but I didn’t know what to do about the Trait. I was in a hurry, and kind of in shock a little, so I kind of threw out the whole perception Trait pool – Observation, I mean – just because I didn’t know what it would be like to have a Trait like that, and I kind of want to start with a Skill first – you know, something I can turn off. There’s a lot of related observation Skills and observation Traits, from what I saw reading my unlocks the other night. I also didn’t take anything from the mana development pool, because I’m already scared of what people I’m not so close to will do if they find out about my mana, so. I took Trait: Planner, and I have no idea what it does, yet.”

  “Hah! Planner. That’s so you,” Heather huffed.

  Danielle realized she was speeding up again, and again forced herself to slow down. “I hope it feels like ‘me’ once I figure out how to use it,” she said. “Anyway, so those were my actual level picks. Then Body and Mind both advanced, presumably both because of our Necessities bags, right?” She chuckled nervously. What was she nervous about? The others chuckled breathlessly. She slowed her steps again.

  “The two Traits that had been ready to level automatically did, right after Body and Mind, and then I also got level-up notices for Illusions and Focus, which I didn’t expect at all,” Danielle reported. “I didn’t see any notifications about those until it happened.”

  “Yes you did,” Sadie said. “You got the notice for Illusions way back in December, remember?”

  “What?” Danielle almost stumbled in surprise.

  “Right after that Christmas talent show where you did the illusion props for our skit,” Sadie reminded her.

  “Oh, wow, I totally forgot about that!” Danielle said, though she remembered now that Sadie brought it up. “Now that you mention it, I think Focus might have even gone sooner. A whole year ago, even, when we were studying for exams. Yeah. I got that one alone in my room, and I just dismissed it and forgot about it, because I didn’t think I’d be seeing base level two for at least six years, probably more. Wow. Those were just sitting there waiting to pop up all this time!”

  “Danielle, slow down,” Heather said. “It’s exciting, I get it, but you keep speeding up. We’re not in that big of a hurry.”

  “Ack, sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten into me,” Danielle said. “I swear I’m not doing it on purpose.”

  “I think you just told us, actually,” Sadie said. “Speed Improvement level 2.”

  “Ooh, that’s a lot more noticeable than level 1 was, if that’s it,” Akari said.

  Danielle tried to slow down again. “Maybe I’ll have an easier time keeping my speed even if I walk behind someone who isn’t getting used to a new Trait, then,” she suggested.

  “Walk behind Sadie,” Akari suggested. “I have Speed Improvement 1 myself, but Sadie is our same body level only without the speed boost. She’ll be the best guide for getting a feel for what a normal walking pace feels like.”

  “Walk behind me!” Heather protested.

  “Nah, you need to learn to speed up, not slow down,” Akari said.

  “I’m the one that’s (huff) out of breath already!” Heather complained.

  “Exactly my point!” Akari said. “Don’t you want to see if you can jump two Body levels when you level your base?”

  Danielle dropped back to walk behind Sadie, and they continued the hike back into town. It felt odd, having to slow her steps so much just to avoid running up on Sadie’s heels. It was hard to place why; her own pace felt normal, but somehow it was faster even though it didn’t feel faster. I’ll get used to it, she told herself.

  At least the rain was easing up, a light breeze blowing the clouds east and clearing a widening arc of the western sky. By the time they got to the tomato patches, it was clear that the afternoon would be sunny, though the trailing edge of the rain clouds hadn’t quite passed them yet. They accidentally passed the neighborhood that had the tomatoes, and had to consult Akari’s sketchy little map, but they only had to backtrack once to find them.

  Once they did, everyone broke out their vegetable bags and started harvesting. It wasn’t terribly fun work, bent over in the increasingly warm and humid middle of the day, but the upside was that they could eat while they picked. Finally, the rain stopped entirely, and Danielle checked her watch.

  “It’s almost noon,” she pointed out to the others. “What do you say we take a short break to finish our jerky snacks, maybe dig a latrine somewhere, and let Heather plant her mint where it won’t be in competition with our tomatoes? Oh, and we were supposed to let Sadie work on her crafting, so I guess after the break, she moves on to that while the rest of us keep picking?”

  “I’m definitely ready for a break,” Heather said, moving over to a short set of brick steps that no longer went anywhere, and sitting down on them. She pulled out her jerky packet without waiting for further discussion, and started munching on it, washing it down with water from a canteen.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “I can get behind that plan,” Sadie agreed, stepping out of the tomato plants and swinging her satchel around to bend down a patch of long grass to sit on. She sat cross-legged on the damp grass, and started eating jerky and cherry tomatoes out of her harvesting bag. A moment later, she also brought out a canteen.

  “Do you think we should try to make a latrine we can use again?” Akari asked. “I mean, since this is an area we hope to be visiting all summer?”

  “Hm. That wasn’t what I was thinking, but it’s a good idea,” Danielle said. “Even if all we do today is dig the hole, if we can make a little bit of a seat and a cover, then we could make it a standard stop on our daily rounds. At least, on days when we’re doing the snare line – tomatoes – fish trap rounds, but I feel like that’s a good enough plan to do at least a couple times a week.”

  “If it works out the way we hope, it will be,” Akari said. “There are a lot of unknowns. Even if it works great today, even if it works OK all week, eventually the rest of our twelve hundred neighbors are going to figure out that they can’t all hunt within five minutes of the Rooms.”

  “Yeah, and someone besides us might eventually find the tomatoes,” Heather said. “It’s like we said before – there’s plenty for four of us, but not for 1200 of us. If someone finds them and blabs to the whole camp, the patch could just be gone in a couple days.”

  “That’s why we definitely have to keep it secret,” Akari said. “If the whole camp comes for these all at once and ruins the patch, they’ll get less out of it altogether than just the four of us would by picking and drying all summer.”

  “Because we’ll get multiple harvests, but if they trample the area, that’s the last harvest for the year,” Sadie said.

  “Maybe ever!” Akari exclaimed.

  “Probably not forever,” Heather said. “My mom had back-bend garden boxes, and she said cherry tomatoes were great because they grew like weeds, so if nothing else was doing well, they still would be.”

  “I bet she’d think these were weird ones, though,” Sadie said, holding up a tomato so dark red it almost looked black in her hand.

  “What do you think about the purple ones?” Akari asked. “I’m kind of afraid to pick them.”

  “Oh, that’s a mana-enhanced variant,” Heather said. “Mom grew some of those, but always in a separate pot, inside the house. She said mana plants absorb mana for us so we don’t have to.”

  “Huh. Maybe, but wouldn’t they also make more mana?” Danielle asked.

  Heather shrugged. “It must not be very much more, or they wouldn’t be allowed Inside at all.”

  “True.” Danielle chewed her jerky thoughtfully.

  “I could try one of my Dome Skills on them,” Sadie said. “Purify Food. It’s supposed to tell me if it can’t make a food safe, so either they’ll be fine and it’ll do nothing, or it’ll make them safe to eat, or it’ll tell me they’re too bad to handle and we’ll know to leave them alone.”

  “Oh, I forgot you had that Skill!” Akari exclaimed.

  “I say, go for it,” Danielle said. “Also, that’s a really clever way to use the Skill – to find out if something is safe to eat, I mean. Good job!”

  “Thanks,” Sadie said with a faint blush, and got up to go find the purple tomatoes. She was partly hidden by the tall grasses and other plants, but a moment later they all heard her laugh. “Wow, it’s not just the tomatoes, the whole plant is mana-purple!” she exclaimed. “That’s so weird looking. Let me see now – ok, good. The Skill says the food is good. It did activate, but it didn’t use any extra mana. If I understood the Skill description and the notes about it in the Ranger’s Guide properly, that means we should’ve been washing these before we ate them all along, but it’s probably nothing serious anyway.”

  “Let’s dump your regular tomatoes in with everyone else’s, and use your bag for just the purple ones while you’re working on your crafts anyway,” Heather suggested.

  “Fine with me. I’m about ready to get to work anyway,” Sadie said. “Here, let me dump some in each of your bags.”

  Heather, Danielle, and Akari each accepted some of Sadie’s tomato harvest, then Sadie gave the bag with the tomato pattern to Heather. Danielle chuckled with the realization that the tomato-red vegetable bag was going to be the only one that didn’t have red tomatoes in it.

  “I’m going to go look for a good place for the latrine,” Akari said. “And I think a few of those big flat stones to cover it when we’re not around. I’ll stay pretty nearby, don’t worry.”

  “You want to just do the digging while Heather and I focus on picking?” Danielle asked.

  “Yeah, if you don’t mind,” Akari said. “I don’t mind digging, I just want a longer break for bending over.”

  “Won’t digging with the camp shovel also be bending over?” Sadie asked.

  “Well, yeah, but in a different position,” Akari said. “More kneeling down in one place than walking bent over at the waist. Plus, I’ll be getting up and down more, getting the rocks and stuff.”

  “It sounds like more work to me. I’m going to pick the mana-tomatoes next,” Heather said.

  “I’ll keep working on the regular red ones, then,” Danielle said. “And the extra-dark reds, I guess.”

  Heather took a few more minutes to eat her jerky, but soon they were all back at work. Sadie took over the steps, and split three of the four largest logs as evenly as she could. Then she sat down and started working on them with her knife, smoothing out the relatively flat surface left by the split, then whittling a flat spot on the back to let it sit on a flat surface without rocking. On the last two of the six, she went further, and added two more flat sections each, so they could be tilted either way and have another angle they would rest at rather than being rounded everywhere but the very bottom.

  “What’s that for?” Danielle asked, blowing a stray hair out of her eyes and looking at what Sadie was doing.

  “It’s a drying idea – tiltable drying logs that we can set next to a fire, so they’re angled towards the fire but won’t go all the way over and dump whatever’s on them,” Sadie said.

  “Ah, cool. You’re definitely pushing for another point to your Mind!” Danielle half complimented, half teased.

  “Hey, what’s the good of being Sent if I don’t come back with wild high Trait numbers?” Sadie joked back.

  Danielle and Heather had moved down the old street to a different patch by the time Akari came back and told everyone the latrine was open for business. She had picked a house well away from the tomato patches – far enough away that Heather chewed her out for going too far alone. As she rightly pointed out, though, they didn’t really want their latrine too close to their food sources. She had done a good job, Danielle thought – the hole was narrow but as deep as Akari could reach, and she had found and used a number of flat stones that she thought were maybe old garden stepping stones. Three of them outlined the hole, well tamped down into the dirt, and a fourth would cover it. The back edge of the hole was against an old wall, rough, but still tall enough to provide some privacy from that direction at least, and solid enough that they could lean against it if they needed to. Akari had pressed some smaller rocks into the dirt around the top of the hole, especially in back, to stabilize the sides and make sure they wouldn’t crumble away further under the wall or the edging stones.

  “For what it is, it’s a work of art,” Danielle said. The others laughed, which irked her a little since she’d meant it seriously, but she had to admit she also saw the absurdity in it.

  “Well, let’s all use it,” Heather said. “Then someone can come watch my back while I plant mint on the other side of the neighborhood, and then I guess we move on to fishing?”

  “I’ll pick some more tomatoes while you’re doing that, but yeah, if Sadie’s at a decent place to pause and move her work, I’m ready to go too,” Danielle said.

  The four of them took turns relieving themselves while the others stood a little way off with their backs to the latrine, forming a second privacy wall. None of them were used to using a pit, and it all felt unnecessarily difficult and awkward, and there was some hasty collection of leaves for “paper substitutes,” but as Sadie put it, “It still beats just picking a tree to hide behind.” Danielle distracted herself while she was waiting for her turn by drawing a better map of the tomato neighborhood in her notebook, including the location of the latrine.

  Akari ended up escorting Heather to plant the mint, while Danielle added more tomatoes to Akari’s vegetable bag. Sadie managed to clean up and carry the cutting and drying logs she’d been working on down to the patch Danielle was working on before the other two came back, “so Heather won’t yell at us, too,” she said.

  that much mana, but do you know how many individual plants there are in a square yard of grass?!

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2