“I haven’t made it yet, for one thing,” Danielle said humorously.
“You did, though. You made hers and yours too, to use up mana,” Sadie said. “We even talked about how to give it to her; if you give it to her in front of her roommates, they’ll know she got it legitimately and stuff. Heather discussed it with her.”
Heather nodded. “I did. Privately! We agreed that she’ll trade you her unenhanced bag, to make it look like you need it to enhance for your own. You can seem to get a few more bags from the catalog in another week or so, but for now, the trade will keep our scavenging stuff secret.”
Danielle looked around, and almost immediately found the two enhanced bags, lying on top of her footlocker along with her original bag and its “wild” enhancement. She could instantly tell that one apart by the location of its mana pattern, since she wasn’t putting her own low-tier enhancements on the clear quartz crystal provided with the bags. She picked up one of the others and checked the purple stone on its “clip” that was formerly a ring.
“It needs a little more flattening,” she said. “I can do it real quick before we go, though.” She got out the hammer and her torn denim shirt, wrapped the area, and pounded it to flatten the clip and make sure it held tighter.
“All right,” she said, putting away the tools and slinging the bag over one shoulder. “I’m ready.”
“Not gonna brush your hair? Wash your face? Grab your staff?” Sadie asked.
Danielle put her face in her hands. “I might still be slightly less than 100% on the whole thinking issue,” she admitted through her fingers. Then she looked up. “Heather didn’t do any of that either! I don’t think.”
“Aheh, I might be a little tired and out of it myself,” Heather admitted. “Let’s get ready properly, then.”
“I better shower, huh?” Danielle said. “I’m going to go get in the shower.”
Danielle showered in her shorts and T-shirt, reflecting that normally that would be a pretty serious sign of not being well enough to go out, but here in the Sending camp it was just ‘how we do laundry.’ Afterward, she tried to use Dehydrate on her clothing. In the end, she had to take off her clothes to make it work, even after a rather long argument with the System about what Dehydrate was and was not good for. The System tried to insist that it was a food-specific Skill, but Danielle pointed out that it was not only a food Skill; it definitely worked on herbs as well, and anyway, the description said it was about taking away the optimum amount of water without damaging important organic structures. That was crucial for all kinds of other organics, too – paper! Books even more so, with their complex interaction of paper, binder’s glue, and inks! Natural fiber clothing like the cotton T-shirt and shorts she was trying to use the Skill on! The vine baskets her party used for fishing! She wasn’t trying to change the Skill, she was trying to use it to its fullest potential, as described in her System and also as she had sought it – wasn’t this issue of drying clothing at least half of what she’d been working on to unlock the Skill? If ‘Dehydrate’ wasn’t the right Skill for drying clothing, then what was?
Heather knocked on the bathroom door to ask if Danielle was all right, and if she was seeing things and/or people again. It was only then that Danielle realized she’d been literally having an argument with the System – or at any rate, with her personal System. It had been talking back! Probably.
She assured Heather that she was just talking to the System about Skills she wanted, and she’d be out momentarily, and tried one more time. She felt a disconcerting and slightly uncomfortable sense of splitting, somewhere inside, but it passed quickly. The water left her clothes, and she put them back on. As she sat on her bed afterward, though, brushing her hair, she couldn’t help wondering what was really happening. Had she successfully, well, talked her System into it? Was she just imagining the System’s half of the ‘conversation?’ Something real had happened – the clothes were dry, after all. She checked her System Interface and found a message:
- ? Skill Applied. Skill: General Dehydrate (T1) added at level 1.
- ? Interface Update: Skill: Dehydrate is provisionally scheduled to be relabeled “Dehydrate Food” at next opportunity. Expected time frame: when skill reaches level 8. (Confirm scheduling? Y/N)
Danielle chuckled and used her trained eye-flicks to confirm the planned renaming. She caught Sadie looking her askance, and explained, “I just got another pox-mana Skill, and I was laughing at what the System chose for me. It’s finally my Skill for drying clothes, because I was literally trying to do that using Dehydrate Food when – I dunno, when the time came for it to happen.”
“Why would you use a food Skill on your clothes?” Sadie asked.
“It was just called Dehydrate! It said it was good for organics! Cotton is organic!” Danielle exasperatedly summarized her argument with the system. “So now I technically have Dehydrate and General Dehydrate, but since the first one refuses to work on anything but food, when I get it to level 8 so I can rename it, I will absolutely rename it Dehydrate Food, and I’m going to start calling it that right away to help keep things straight.”
Sadie stared at her. Danielle would’ve been slightly offended if she hadn’t looked so exhausted; as it was, she imagined Sadie was just taking some time to parse what she’d said. “Ranger Flo says renaming Skills supposedly hasn’t happened since the days of the Spread, except when they ‘evolve’ from one tier to the next,” she finally said.
“Well she’s wrong,” Danielle said. “I asked about it in the Dome, and it told me you can rename Skills at ‘significant high levels’ – um, that may be more a paraphrase than a quote, but it’s like, levels 8 and 10 and crazy high ones above that. So it probably isn’t a thing regular Insiders ever do, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been possible all along. Oh! And you can always do it the first time you’re at an Access Point with that Skill, which if you’re at an Access Point when you take the Skill, obviously means your one chance is right then. Otherwise, it’s set until level 8. Oh, and you probably had to either already know or think to ask; remember how the wild Access Point didn’t offer that many suggestions, but if you poked around, you could do more stuff?”
“I don’t think I poked around enough for that,” Sadie said.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Oh. Maybe the urge to poke around is a Mana Researcher thing,” Danielle said with a tentative smile.
Sadie chuckled. “Maybe you’re just always a tiny bit crazy, and all the fever did was take the brakes off and let all the crazy out at once,” she joked.
“I think my fever-induced leveling plan for Field Medic just might support that theory,” Danielle joked back, relieved when Sadie laughed a little harder.
Danielle braided her hair and got the denim layer of her uniform on while she waited for Heather and Akari to get done with their own showers and get ready. She also remembered to belt on her sword and knife, though she left the hatchet and bow behind. When the other two seemed basically ready, she picked up the enhanced bag for Cassy and her staff, and activated Flash Shield.
“Well, you look ready,” Akari conceded. “Time to see if you still have issues with the door.”
Danielle nodded seriously, not to say nervously, and led the way to the door of the room. She checked for hostiles (none). Opening the door, she cautiously looked out.
The men in white uniforms were still there.
Their uniforms looked remarkably like the Ranger uniforms, except luminously white – literally luminous. Glowing! They each had a sheathed sword at their belt, and a large round shield worn across the back on what looked like a blonde leather strap. Their features made her think their hair should be dark, but it was pure white instead; they didn’t look even slightly old, though. The one that stayed by the door had straight hair and blue eyes that occasionally seemed to flicker with lightning. The one who kept coming in and touching her head had brown eyes and tightly curly hair. He turned towards her.
“Going out today?” he asked, speaking in mana instead of sound.
Danielle frowned at him. “You’re still here. Now my roommates are going to think I’m still hallucinating,” she said.
“Here we go,” Heather muttered behind her.
The man shrugged. “I don’t control what they think,” he said, and then he reached out and touched her head again.
Danielle sighed. “Must you?” she asked.
“I think today will be the last day,” he said. “You’ll probably stop seeing us after that, too.”
“She will,” the other said. “She’ll still be able to hear us if we keep getting instruction to talk to her System, though.”
“So do I have to wait until tomorrow to go out?” Danielle asked.
“Oh, no, you can come out now that your pox is producing less than twice the mana of your own System,” the curly-haired one said. “I’ll be following after you for safety, but we were only blocking you from exiting while the mana was clouding your mind.”
“Come on, Danielle, in or out!” Akari said.
“I’d like to leave, then,” Danielle said, directing her words to the back of the straight-haired man, who was still blocking the door. “Please.”
“Ah – right, you can still see us,” he said, and moved across the walkway, turning to stand facing the door. The curly-haired one simply stepped back towards the corner of the building.
“Thank you,” Danielle said, and stepped out into the walkway, and just a bit to the side. She looked back in at Akari and Heather, who both seemed to be waiting for something. “You guys still can’t see them, huh?” she asked.
“We can’t,” Akari said uneasily. “Are you coming back in?”
“No, they cleared the door, it’s safe to come out,” Danielle said.
“You’re sure you’re not waiting until tomorrow?” Heather asked.
Danielle shook her head – and it didn’t make her dizzy the way it had Sunday night, so that was encouraging. “They said it’s fine. Apparently my pox mana production is low enough now.”
Akari finally came out and joined Danielle. “Did they tell you who they were, this time?” she asked.
“They’re messengers,” Danielle said, then realized she wasn’t sure why she was so sure of that. She looked to the curly-haired man for confirmation, and he smiled softly and nodded.
Heather finally came too. “Messengers of head-poking, huh?” she asked sarcastically.
“I don’t actually know what that part’s about,” Danielle admitted. “He did it again, though.”
“Well, don’t just stand there staring at thin air,” Heather said. “If we're going, let's go. The next room is 6018, right Akari?”
Akari pulled a card out of her own bag and looked at it. “That’s what the floor plan says. Other buildings have people in rooms that end with 20 but not building six, so it’s 18, 14, 12, then room 8 is another one that’s occupied in most buildings but not ours, then it’s Cassy’s room and room 6002.”
Danielle looked at the card, upside-down because she was facing Akari while Akari read it. “Only six full rooms on each side, in our building?”
“Right – it’s eight in the fuller buildings,” Akari said. “Nine on a couple specific floors, I guess. None of those is our problem, though.”
“I activated Hostility Sense before coming out. Let’s walk down far enough to confirm nobody in these back rooms is hostile, and then we can start knocking on doors, if that’s what we’re doing.”
Akari and Heather agreed, and Danielle confirmed with some relief that no one in the lower floor was generally hostile to her. Then they came back to 6018 and started the door-to-door temperature checks. The process went like this: they would knock on the door, try to parse a shouted answer, and when they inevitably failed, they reminded the person inside that they couldn’t open the door on their own. Forgetting that the doors were not merely locked but warded shut seemed to be a common issue. Then an exhausted-looking girl would come to the door, and Heather would introduce herself as “Healer Orellana” and read a list of questions from the back of a card like the one Akari had.
Was everyone with a rash taking their Fever-Ace every six hours? (No, Heather couldn’t do anything about the Now Hear This messages; the Rangers had forbidden the Sent Healers from interfering with it on grounds that a lot of people needed the messages to know when it was medication time.) Was everyone who needed to take Fever-Ace drinking a full canteen of water for every dose they took during the day? Was everyone in the room eating three meals a day and taking their Urgent-C supplements, to promote healing? Only after going through that list did Heather ask if anyone needed their temperature taken for the Ranger Healers.
In room 6018, their nearest neighbors along the walkway, all the question-list answers were yes, and while they believed they were feverish, they felt things were under control enough not to bring the Rangers into it.
In 6014, they weren’t drinking their water or eating all their provided soup, so Heather volunteered to fill canteens and heat soup if the room was OK with the SHAD party trio coming in. Danielle kept her mouth shut and followed Heather’s lead, washing spoons while Akari lit a little camp stove designed to hold a small pot over a solid fuel source like a candle or “canned heat” (or a pile of twigs, Danielle supposed, but canned fuel was at hand). It reminded her of the one she’d snagged from the necessities store, but it wasn’t the same model – a different brand, perhaps.
A convenient ring in the top of this model of camp stove was precisely the right size to hold the cans, and Heather stirred a can of soup over the little stove for each person in the room. Danielle washed and filled canteens in the meantime, and Akari carried the full canteens and hot soup to each person as they became ready, not coincidentally keeping her between the people at the beds and Heather in the kitchen. The residents of 6014 also did not feel the need to call on the Rangers, since they were keeping up with their Fever-Ace and using their own Local Antihistamine to suppress the itching enough to sleep.
In 6012, they were taking their medicine and staying hydrated and fed, but still wanted their temperatures taken. There, Heather led her trio in, but Akari and Danielle waited by the counters while Heather checked everyone’s temperatures with her hand before using Detect Internal Temperature only on the person who felt hottest to her. Heather pulled the mana pox booklet that had come with the supply crates out of her satchel and held it up next to the girl whose temperature she was taking to figure out what temperature went with the color the Skill showed her.
“OK, the highest temperature here is 100-point-something,” she said. “Less than 101, for sure, and you’re taking care of each other properly, so you’ll be fine. Just keep up the Fever-Ace every time the messages come, make sure you don’t skip water or meals, and nap as much as you can.” The girls seemed relieved, and thanked Heather sincerely; then it was time to visit Cassy’s room.