I turn the water back on with an extra thaum and spend another hour singing and trying to make a sound barrier in the hot rain. When I finally step out, I find three sets of clothes nicely folded in the shower’s lobby. Identical sets, just as I asked for. Including undergarments. That was kinda dumb. I should've asked for 3 different shirts. I put on the clothes and shoes, and step out into the beach hut.

Hanging on a new coat-rack is a very stylish black leather jacket. Lots of chrome studs and spikes, but no hanging chains. I walk over, try it on, and although it’s a bit heavy, it’s nice to wear. I wouldn’t really want to run in the thing, because I’d get tired too fast, but it’s not restricting my movement much at all. Certainly nicer than the jackets I used to bike in.

“Dude. That’s a really nice jacket. Thanks.”

“You chose it, paid for it, and even collected the materials. I merely notified you that it was an option.”

“Dude. It was all you. You the plant."

I continue with questions, "Anyhow, I was wondering. Do you know anything about how anyone else is doing? Is there any way to communicate?”

“There is no communication between participants in the first month. I know no specifics of how individuals besides yourself are doing, but I have general statistics. Ten percent of your population failed to respond effectively to the first monkey attack. A further fifteen percent failed to address the second. And the third had a two in three casualty rate. Roughly 3 billion earthers have survived until now.”

“Wow.”

“I sincerely hope that the people you care about are not among the deceased, Kevin”

“Thanks, A-Rhod,” I say, and subvocalize, "-odendron."

Louder, I continue, “I tried to work the sound-o-magic in the shower, but I didn’t get very far. I think I might have been able to make it louder, but it was hard to tell with just my voice. Not a very controlled experiment. Might work better with drums. Let’s top off my thaums so I can get back to monkeyfight practice."

“About that drumming bit. I thought I noticed something odd about your recovery time last time through. Would you be able to take some time out of your schedule for another round of experiments?”

“Am I still gettin’ paid?”

“Of course compensation is forthcoming for your assistance in mapping the connection between sound and thaumic attraction”

24 hours later, my contract is up and we’ve able to determine that the tempo of the beat has a positive, apparently linear relationship to thaumic energy flux. More energy moves towards faster beats than towards slower beats. It seems that the beat has to be both rhythmic, and somewhat varied. Running my New World Record BPM attempt again, my tail’s better, and my speed is better under control, I manage a bit over 5kbpm. I even break a stick, Peart-reverse it and keep going. I think I missed 2 beats. Turns out that just hitting things fast doesn’t improve the thaum flows. It's not interesting enough I guess.

At the end, the Robotanical tells me that we’ve learned two things. First, some beats are better than others for thaumic attraction. What makes the difference? We don’t know, but variation seems to have a real impact. Second, faster is straight up better. I’m running at three and change times faster than human, with an extra tail where the extra limb buys me between 25-50% extra speed. Overall, the best flow we’ve seen is a bit over a thaum an hour of absorption for me, which is somewhere between six and eight times what it would be without the beat and the trance.

He also tells me that I’d better get to practicing, because round four is harder than the first three.

I immediately turn around and spend two of my o-Thaums on improving my distended pockets. They’re still attached to me, but they’re much more mobile, and hold something like a thousand cubic feet each. Even better, they can be manipulated like the edges of a large trash bag, big enough to fit any of my drums easily in any direction. I’m told they don’t rip like trash bags either.

And then I practice. I run about a two-hour cycle. One hour of drumming for thaums. Fifteen minutes of drumming for sonicmancy. Then I manage thirty minutes of escrima, and 15 dedicated minutes of echolocation. I’m not gaining thaums, but I’m not losing them either. The audiomancy eats energy like alligators chompin’ wildebeasts, but the searing practice is pretty mellow.

Four days into my practice, two days before the monkey deadline, Coach P is telling me that my three-stick escrima strikes are good enough to break joints on that big monkey.

Around the same time, I get my echolocation working. I’ve actually got better “vision” with my echo than I do with my eyes. Well, it's better so long as I don’t want color, and I'm looking at stuff that's medium close. Better, I can operate with my eyes open. My new favorite game is “batting” with my tail stick: behind me, without turning around. The extra agility, the unreal hearing, the radar-hawk are killin’ it. And then I move three times as fast but gravity doesn't. It’s almost the case that I can’t miss.

The weirdest thing about moving three times as fast is that I have to get over my expectation of gravity moving what I'm trying to hit as I swing. I move so fast now, and my echolocation is so good that sub-second gravity may as well be slow motion.

And on top of all that, I have one more win. My audiomancy can make a sound wall in two different flavors. The wall can reflect, or it can absorb sound that hits it. Next task that Sarge has for me is to make more than one. But it ain’t time for that now. It’s finally time for a forest monkey hunt.