By the time I’m back in the clearing, the voices in my head have given me some ideas. The first idea is that I can get some sort of projectile weapon. A crossbow maybe a good idea, because it’s so easy to aim, while a bow and arrow or a slingshot is thought to be perhaps even better. Crossbow load times are crap, and we expect to miss a lot at the beginning. The goal is to annoy the critters, not to hurt them. They just have to get close so we can fight. The slingshot seems like it would do the job as well as anything

Second idea is that we could probably go a long ways towards what we want if we could annoy the monkeys in another way. Maybe we could hit them with sound. Right now, my sound walls are only flat. Pepper says that it’s only a little bit of extra work to curve the walls, and that curved sound walls could let us annoy the monkeys from a good distance. If we can do it quickly and easily enough, that could also work.

When we get back, Mr. Smartie Plants asks how the monkey hunt went, and we tell him about it, and then about our plans to use crossbows and slingshots. He says that the physical law differences involving momentum in this dimension, the ones that made my 200mph fastball only stun the monkey, have an even bigger effect on bows and slingshots. In the long term, if I want to hit things, I need to throw them. If something has a toughness modifier, arrows aren’t likely to do more than tickle. He talks more about assisted throws also being an option, but I don't really pay attention. Does that mean like Lacrosse?

Somewhat depressed, I take a couple hours of thaumic drumming as therapy. A memory occurs to me, so I switch over to sound wall practice. In 43 minutes, my sound wall is no longer flat. In two hours and twelve minutes, the wall is roughly parabolic, and with 38 seconds left before we hit five hours, I have a working parabolic sound-thrower, like what the police used to use for crowd control. Who knew acoustic engineering would be the most important class I ever took? With a minute of setup, I can manage old-school crowd dispersal. Not salt-guns or firehoses, but rather targeted loud-beams. Flashsounds?

It takes me about forty five seconds to build the flashsounder in front of my mouth, and then most of my concentration. And I can’t move while building or after it's built. It’s completely stationary. That said, I can annoy things at 80 yards at least, and probably more. When I show Daisy Downer my new move, he asks how my aim is. It takes a bit more than another three hours, using a hastily purchased array of ultrathin diaphragms to manage non-electric sound identifiers beffore I can reliably hit a target.

The trick seems to be to stay still, and set up the parabolic shape right in front of the mouth. The sound beam goes straight ahead. So long as I can adjust my facing so that my eyes and mouth are facing directly at the target, I can hit it, if I don’t have to move.

Heck, I can be a dragon. A Soundragon. No. Wait, that was some teenies trance music. Need a better name. Saserface. Like Taserface, but with sound lasers. Note: I need better names for all my cool moves. Wait, saserface is a move, not a moniker. I can call out: saserface, and shoot. Or wait 45 seconds and shoot. Maybe I need practice first.

Anyhow, my saserface move is locked and loaded. I can go annoy the shit out of some monkeys now. Then they’ll come down and fight, and I can drum them to death.

It’s a lot easier to follow the aquaricrumbs and get back to where I left the monkeys than it was to wander there in the first place. Only takes like 10 minutes when I know where I’m going. And then there’s no monkeys around that I can find. They must have gone home. It’s so cool to be finally able to mix seeing and searing.

Sound usually disperses pretty well over distance, so echolocation isn’t as useful at 100 yards. Up-close though, and especially behind me, it rocks. I'm even doing better at getting second hand echoes and seeing behind things. But I've got a ways to go.

Normally, creatures hear by means of little hairs in their ears, which are disturbed, three steps removed, by the vibrations in the air which constitute sound. Those ear hairs are connected to bones and nerve cells in the inner ear which, when moved, transmit information to the brain and the auditory cortex. Ear shapes are all about getting the vibrations into the ears, without allowing anything else in there. I bypassed most of the concern anyone has with hearing by getting Weird Al to give me a regenerating Mohawk hooked into my auditory cortext. Now instead of twenty tiny inner ear hairs, I have a bajillion foot-long, stiff hairs to collect the sound.

Echolocation is just basically hooking hearing up to your visual cortex, and getting spatial mapping out of it. Almost everyone hooks up spatial mapping in the brain to visuals. But sound history class taught us that by the early twenty-teens, some blind folks were doing it without support, with normal ears. Sumdude named Fish or Kish or something? The real life Batman? Anyhow, in another couple improvements to my senses, I should be able to see everything within a hundred yards, with line of sight not impacting me at all.

Right now though, my echos have an effective range of under twenty yards, and I can't find the damn monkeys; I’m seeing and searing nothing.

If monkeys are foraging through the trees, I’m not really sure why I’d expect them to stay in the same place for ten hours. Okay. Less sound theory. More wandering. More looking for monkeys.

Takes me another twenty minutes and change before I finally spot a group up in the trees. I find two, and then wait another five minutes looking to see if there are more of them. Looks like there’s just two.

I line up my shot, and then yell,“Saserface!” as the trigger to blast the monkey with a concentrated sound beam. It looks down at me, screeches, and starts tearing down the tree. A couple screeches later, its friend does too.

I settle into my fighting stance, and get a grunt of almost-approval from Coach Phuc. I’ve got gel in my pocket, three escrima sticks, and I’m absurdly fast. Ok, Kevin, don’t underestimate your opponents.

First monkey touches the ground. He starts running towards me. A second later, the second hits ground. Phuc suggests that I wait for them to get closer, rather than going to visit. As expected, the first one slows down, and circles left, while the back monkey speeds up and circles right. When they’re on opposite sides of me, they both spring forward.

A second later, Coach gives me a C minus. My strike angle was off on the back monkey. Sloppy. Also he says there’s no way it should take 2 strikes to end a 20 pound monkey, even if it does have big teeth. Also, I’m supposed to hold my left hand behind on the next fight if there’s only 1 or 2 monkeys. Good Practice. No lazy. Coach Phuc is alway so darned helpful.

Regardless, that’s 57 r-thaums for me, and I move on. Thirteen minutes later, I find a second pair of monkeys, saserface at them, and my grade goes up to a B minus. I didn’t even swing with the left hand.

Three hours and eleven groups of monkeys later, I haven’t seen a group larger than three. On the other hand, most of the packs were threes. The third group was a threesome, and one of them sunk its fangs into my forearm when I missed my lefty swing. None of the others even touched me. I feel like that old video game, Pacman, when it gets modded, and Pac is on triple speed. The monkey ghosts are running around in slowmo, and Pac is just eating them all up. It’s getting dark, but that doesn’t bother me. On the other hand, finding the monkeys in the first place is getting harder when I can’t see them.

I get back to the hut, eleven hundred r-thaums richer, set up the drum set again, and sink into a Harper Grohl groove for three hours. Then I’m back to practice. Searing practice with Pep is petering out, as I use it all the time, and my skill is almost at the top of what he can teach. It’s crazy to be able to “see” the drums as well as I could in the daytime when it’s dark out.

Escrima, audiomancy, and more drums is the order of the night. By the end of the night, I can move my saserface construct a few inches without disrupting it, and it only takes fifteen minutes to rebuild. Also, I finally got two soundwalls made. I can bounce sound off one angled wall, and then a second before the echo comes back to me. This is so cool. My own audio studio is coming soon.

I welcome the dawn with some jazz drums. Mostly Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, with a bit of Cindy Blackman.