For the last year or so my bandmates have been hunting for thaums. Mostly, folks with four or five advances can’t recover thaums very well, so they have to either hunt, or spend a lot of time resting while other folks are on watch. This team has been hunting for a while.

While they’re not a village of twenty, they are a group that have worked together for a while. They’re moderately safe. I ask how they’ve been dealing with the flying beasts, figuring I can help with that. They thank me for reminding them, and Miguel waves his hands a bit. A dozen metal poles raise from the ground to about ten feet tall, and then metal streamers unfurl between them, making something of a weave. It looks kinda like how folks used to weave potholders out of cloth strips, but made of metal and a loose weave. Maybe it's more like lace or something. Is it tatting? Great grandma Schmidtz used to talk about that.

They tell me that they’ve been at that location for about a week. Their pattern for the last year has been to drift slowly west towards the gate to zone two. They travel for about a week, let their thaums get low, and then stop somewhere to hunt and rest. They stay for a week or two, and then do it again. Even though they don't need to sleep, they’re only covering about forty miles a day, or three hundred miles a week, and then stopping each night to rest because they can’t see in the dark.

It’s only recently that they’ve started finding creatures that challenged them. Between metal dome defense, tasers, moderate electricity, and lightning bolts from the sky, they’ve been able to handle darn near everything that comes up. They even have a super-defense move of pushing the dome underground. They've got an elevator to an underground bunker, if they’ve had time to set it up. If they had a glassblower, Priyu--that’s the better nickname--says they could make a lightbulb or lantern that works. They can already start fires with lightning strikes, so they have the capability to light torches off a lightning-struck tree. Overall, though, they prefer travel in the day.

We agree that we’re headed towards the gate in the west. It won’t be at my pace, but we can potentially double or quadruple their speed by walking through the night, and letting me play the thaum whorl on my toms. It's time to move on, because apparently there are pretty few creatures left around the area after they've hunted for a week.

I slot into the group pretty well. I tell them I’m the lookout. Priyu laughs and calls me the rogue. Unfortunately, it’s not for my roguish good looks she’s referring to. She was a retro tabletop gamer when she was young, so she has the whole Dungeons and Dragons party setup in her head. She says I’m the rogue, and not the rouge. I don't know what she’s on about, but she thought it was funny.

Steve is dee pee ess, which means that he hits the things that we fight until they die. Miguel is supposedly a tank, which I can totally see when he armors up like Colossus. Apparently tank means he makes sure we don’t take damage, and if someone gets hit, it's him. Of course P is the healer. She says that we have the makeup of a good party.

Before we travel together, though, Piyu makes us practice for a couple days. The practice is not a lot of fun. We have to trudge around, looking for threats, and then responding quickly. She has Miguel go out and set up some metal poles on our route. I have to find them. I'm good enough with my echolocation that we only need to do that for four hours before Stinky has us stop.

After she knows how well we can find stuff, she has us do some sparring with each other for the next few days. I can get hits in on Miguel easily, but my sticks against his iron man impression don’t do a lot. On the other hand, he basically can’t hit me either. He doesn’t have the level of combat practice I got with Flynn, and I’m moving at eight times his speed.

However, he can make it really hard for me to get anywhere near him if he gets to pick the terrain. Metal spikes coming out of the ground are impossible for me to react to, and all I can do is stay ahead of him and dodge. On the other hand, my soundwall stuns work against Steve as well, so I have a chance to get away. It doesn’t work for very long after the third round, but it does work to buy me a quarter second, and that’s usually all I need to do what I’m trying to do. Not that it hurts him, but I can annoy him. Piyu says I work really well as a dodge-tank. I tell her she’s gotten her foreign languages mixed up with her English.

Fighting Steve mostly doesn’t work for me. His electrical control means that he can shock me from anywhere nearby. He only uses static electricity carpet-scuffing levels of discharge, but it hurts. The main reason he’s kicking my butt is that he doesn’t have to aim his little shocks. No aim means I can’t dodge, which means he gets me almost all the time. I don’t have a counter to that, really. Piyu says something about a Fair Day cage or something being a hard counter, but I don’t know what weather has to do with anything. She seems a wee bit overeducated.

On the other hand, I’m able to get up and tap him with the stick when I borrow a dozen conductive rebars from Miguel. Steve does the move where he gets ready to electrify me, and since I’m so much faster, I whip out a rebar, plant it in the ground, and hide behind it like I’m Bugs Bunny with a street sign. You want conductive? You got conductive. I win one match before he responds by creating a charged field around him. Anyone, being me, getting closer than ten feet away gets shocked. When he plays electric turtle, I hit him with a nonconducting plastic frisbee from the sports pack I got from Alec, which shocks (hah!) him enough for me to tag him a second time. The final score is two to twenty-seven.

At least when I fight Priya, it’s pretty even. She has almost two decades of Aikido practice. I have sticks, size and speed. She’s more agile and prepared, and smarter. I win more, but given that I move at mach three, I have about twelve feet of reach on her tiny five-three frame, and she's not used to fighting someone with a tail, the fact that we’re even means that she’s surprisingly good. None of her moves are lethal though. They’re all methods which encourage me to accidentally encounter the dirt face first at high speeds. She has good healing for the fractures, but pretty quickly I start to look like a pig who just had a good wallow in the mud.

After we're done, I call her Stinky and she calls me Dirty, and we start getting this show on the road.