I toss my drums into my pockets, and head towards camp. They know my music.

There are indeed three of them. A white guy with a guitar, a hispanic dude with a bass, and an Indian lady at the piano. The fire is pleasant and talking with musicians is divine.

The bass player is Miguel. He’s thirty and originally from Chihuahua, Mexico, but he’s been living in Phoenix since he moved there in ‘42. Before the transition, he was an ironworker. According to him, that means that he built the steel skeletons of buildings in the downtowns of every city in the American southwest. His grandpa introduced him to Santana, and he started picking at the guitar, but then he saw a live Red Hot Chili Peppers video, and fell for Flea’s magic on the bass. For musical background, he was playing bass in a band with a couple older ironworkers in local bars.

Miguel is also responsible for the dome, and for the holes in the critters I had found. Being a steel girder specialist, he chose metallomancy as his magic, and his build is mostly toughness. His skin is tough enough it might be harder than the metal he shapes and moves. He was already strong like an ox before the transition, having had to lift way too many hunks of metal on earth, and what bits of his build didn’t go into toughness went into strength. He doesn't say "it's clobberin' time," but he may as well, given his build. Unlike Vic, he’s not specialized into iron, but rather into metal in general.

As a metal mage, he’s also responsible for having built most of the instruments: Steel string guitars, the piano plate, and the piano strings are all his. To hunt, he says he throws metal spears, and helps them go faster and stronger with his metal-mancy. Mostly though, his job while hunting isn’t offense. He does defense with metal fortifications and spear walls and such.

Steve is the guitarist, and an offensive specialist. He’s from Philadelphia, and used to work as an electrician. And, of course, the guitarist electrician plays the magic electric guitar. He demonstrates with lightning bolts zipping out of his guitar as he strums.

Steve is 25, and used to play guitar for his nineteen year old sister in the evenings as she was trying to get her start as a pop diva. It hadn’t worked out by the time the transition happened. He doesn’t know where she is, and hopes she’s all right. Fuck this world.

After an hour of chatting and getting to know one another, he insists on showing his big attack. Miguel puts up target dummy made of metal and Steve calls down lightning from the clouds after a big warmup. Apparently he can do a pretty good job of guiding the current. The target dummy explodes and Miguel hides us all behind a metal curtain that zips up from the ground.

Miguel is almost fast enough, but a spare metal shard from the exploding dummy flies out and buries itself three inches into Steve’s thigh.

“You idiots,” exclaims Priyanka, the pianist, as she heads over to try to pull the metal chunk out. Miguel removes it faster with his magic, and then Priyanka does something she calls ygeiamancy [ee-gay-uh] to fix him. That’s apparently health magic, and her own greek translation because of course she speaks Greek.

Priyanka, which somehow shortens to Piyu, was a doctor, also born and raised in Philadelphia. She’d studied medicine because her parents insisted, and she got good enough grades for it. She had almost gotten up enough courage to study music instead, but even though she was second generation American, there was still obligation to the family. So she worked as a doctor, and then played piano for the local Methodist church choir. Being just that kind of overeducated high achiever, she also had a black belt in aikido. In this world she went with a build that balanced speed, agility, vision, and endurance.

She has us all rolling on the floor as she explains how she tried to reconcile her hippocratic oath and nonviolent tendencies with the monkeys of the tutorial. Between that, her aikido, and her knowledge of anatomy, she’d been able to find weak points in the sasquatch after the fifth time it ran into the ground face first. She did give it five opportunities to reconsider it's choices before actually fighting to hurt it.

Piyu--I’ll admit I laughed at calling the lovely lady stinky--plays the role of the healer in this band. The boys need it when they do something stupid like explode things that throw can metal shards into Steve’s leg. I get the impression this wasn’t the first such incident. With a deep aikido background and serious doctoring chops, she’s pretty opposed to killing things, but she’s happy to take care of the team.

Priyanka also does a bunch of the thinking for the team. She’s overeducated, but she's actually smart too. She figured out that between Steve’s electricity and Miguel’s metal, they can make a taser, and they don’t have to stop at the non-lethal voltages that the Taser company lawyers always insisted they sent. On the other hand, we don’t know what kind of current monsters like spider persons--Steve calls them Ettercaps--can handle, so they often just throw spears first if Steve isn't ready to call down lightning from the clouds.

The whole camp has a lot of metal across the ground. Miguel needs it available to use if critters attack. Also, it makes good defenses, and Steve can use it to conduct electricity well. If nothing else, they can set up a pretty nasty electric fence in a few seconds.

Along the way, I share my skills, those few that I have. My thaum-regeneration skills, my audiomancy, and my crazy good searing. Piyu spends a bunch of time studying my tail, and I don’t even make any jokes about obligations after playing with a guy’s third leg. I must still be missing Yulia.

That night, we spend four hours talking, five hours making music, and another three with me drumming so everyone can be full up on thaums. In the morning, Priyanka gets out a funky lookin' teapot, and then looks pointedly at Steve. Steve screws up his face into something that's either a concentration look or a have-to-shit look, and then Piyu drops some herbs or something into the pot. Ten minutes later, she serves us all tea. I eventually learn that the teapot operates on the same principles as an electric teakettle, with flash-boiling via electricity.

I get out my shower, and explain it to a chorus of rousing cheers. Everyone gets a quick rinse, then we talk about what we’re going to do with this band.