I grab for my sticks as I roll out of bed, throw my legs over, and damn, my legs move fast. I have to catch myself as I land on the drum stool.

“All good, all changed?” I ask Treant, and get dizzy a moment.

“Taken care of,” he responds brightly, and I fall off my stool back onto the bed.

“Whispers,” I whimper as I fall over trying to make frantic shh-ing gestures. My hand moves too fast and smacks me in the nose.

As quiet as a leaf falling, Alec asks, “Is your ear sensitivity too high?”

It sounds like shouting, so I put my hands over my ears.

“Yes, too loud.” I hope he can read lips. “Can I buy a volume control?”

Too bad the plant doesn’t move. He could just give me a leaves up.

“Yes. Standard, or multi-channel?” the plant breathes, even quieter

“Multichannel. Now. I don’t care what it costs.”

“Starting,” says Alec near silently, as Frodo counts seconds in my head. 2. 3. 4. 5.

“Done,” whispers the magic weed and I start trying to figure out how to control my hearing.

17 minutes and 32 seconds later, I uncurl from my hands-over-ears fetal position on the bed. I figured it out. I’ve got volume control on my hearing. I imagine-see the knobs and sliders our sound engineer Puck used to ride … so I find the master volume control, and slide him way down. I snap my fingers as a test, and it’s actually a bit muffled. I let it back up a bit. Then down, until I can hear again.

“Someone shoulda thought of that before we turned that on. And you’re the smart one, stem-brain. Hey...I’m fiddling with the controls on my mental mixboard, and is there a “keep the sound level no higher than this” capability? Like noise canceling headphones that kick in automatically when it hits 80 decibels? That way I can turn up the hearing, without worrying about getting my brain scrambled?”

“That potential was not included. It’s cheap enough for you to still afford, though. Would you like to add the capability?"

“Dude. I think I have to.”

“That will leave you with just seven R-Thaums”

“Worth it. Hit me.”

It only takes another 23 seconds before I find the new control in my mixbrain. I turn it on, with the intent to never turn it off again.

The next 4 days are a whirlwind of activity. I move a bit more than 3 times as fast as I used to. My whole body does. So I have to learn to walk again. It takes six hours of mostly walking and then later running before I’m good on my feet again. At the end, I swear I’m doin’ forty miles an hour running. Took a while. Also, I had some spectacular falls.

I had to drum frequently in between my mobility practice because my Thaum consumption up to 630% of what it used to be. Good news: I'm using my tail for balance more now.

After learning to walk, the next 6 hours is spent getting my hands and tail to move at the speeds I know they can. Takes a couple hours of warming up before the new coordination clicks, and I can just drum faster. Over the next 4 hours, I run speed metal riffs. War by Meshuggah. Dragonforce. Slayer. Executive Compensation by Iconoclast. And then I double my timer. And then triple it. I’m playing real songs at 1000 BPM. Not some bullshit drum-test of how many beats you can hit in a minute, but I’m actually playing music at those speeds. I did the BPM test once when I was young and stupid, and then not more than once a year since. I never reached anywhere near the ‘55 world record of 1483 BPM BUT...I managed a solid 1200 a couple times. 1203, 1211. That used to be the fastest I could move my sticks. Now I can drum at those speeds. For shits and giggles, I try a BPM test. Unfortunately, the shrubbery in the corner won’t count beats or instrument my beats, so I have to guess. I’d say I’m closer to 3K BPM now, and that’s still learning how to deal with high speed taps and the tail. I should be able to hit nearly 6k BPM once I get all the kinks worked out. That’s 4 times faster than anyone on earth ever and 5 times faster than the world record from the 20s.

Once my legs and arms and tail can move fast, then it’s escrima drills. Sensei Phuc is all over my ass for the next 6 hours. I keep it slow the whole time, just learning to use the body right. Next practice, I was going to have to buy a martial arts dummy, but Alec bought one for me, and I'm outta juice. And I don't have time before ape-a-geddon to work on generating thaums.

In between moving, drumming, and stickfighting, I’m working on echolocation. I don’t have it down to inches, but the autoclicker is amazing. I’m tuning my echolocation to focus on the hundred kay Hertz zone, and setting my clicker to click every quarter second in that range. This means I’m constantly bombarded by that noise, and that means I have a lot of spatial info that I’m learning to use. When trying to find things with my see-hearing-hawk, I’m within a foot or so. Eyes closed, it’s like walking around in a spirit world, where everything’s white, and hazy, but you can see where everything is, even if not exactly. And it’s always there. I remember. It's like the old movies about the gnomes, when Frodo puts on the ring. I can close my eyes, or open them, and I “see” the sonic world.

It’s still a lot easier to see-hear--oh yeah, sear--with my eyes closed, though I'm getting closer to being able to merge the representations. Maybe next week. Right now, I have to pick which one to focus on. And it pushes headache if I try to do both.

All the while, I’m tracking the time, and my energy consumption pretty hard. About two and a half hours of hard practice eats an old full-day of energy. And then an hour and a half brings it back. That doesn’t match the what Alec-plant said. The A.P. exam is messed up. Heh heh. But I don’t have time for more tests. Nor time for extra drumming. When I’m Thaum-ful again, we run the exercises again, and harder.