It didn't happen today. I went topside, did my normal run for 2 hours, and scanned everything I could find with my sonar. I kinda wish I could just visualize the whole thing as one of those old-school radar display screens, with my position in the middle, and all the stuff around me further out. The refresh rate is a lot slower than radar, though. A thousand feet per second for sound is a lot slower than the speed of light and radar.

There was nothing within my three mile range in any direction. If the rescuers got caught, that would be really bad. Maybe it’s taking them a while to find Piyu. Maybe it takes a bit to mount a rescue operation. It’s probably not that they’ve just left. They ran once they heard my warning. I haven’t been stabbed or anything since I gave my warning. That probably means that they weren’t captured.

Or does it? The slavers can’t really expect loyalty from me. But I’m tremendously helpful, upgrading their time frame from thirty years to fifteen months. So if I quietly betrayed them, and they found out, what would they do? Would they watch me closely? Might they prepare to kill me if I misbehave more? Would they torture me? Or would they just watch me for now, as I make thaums for us all?

I check on Sharon first, then go back down, and have to tell the captives what happened. On the way, I end up testing the sound-through-doors plan. When I got back in the cavern, the slaves complained about the speed of the message because I didn’t properly account for the speed-up, and they complained about the volume. Apparently, I overdid the amplification part. Turns out that it was good that I didn’t need to send a message because it didn’t work to communicate. My audiomancy can fix both of those, and I get down to it after the required eight hours of thaum production and two hours of physical activity.

I spend a few hours testing the microphone trick again. Then I use the back corner of the room that isn’t being included in the time bubble, to tune my message until everyone is happy with both the volume and the speed. Unfortunately, an hour tinkering with the volume outside the sound bubble made six hours in the sound bubble, so I have to get back to work pretty fast.

I’m just gonna call my six day cycle between aboveground days a week for the time being. It’s easier to think that way. The rest of my week when I’m not drumming for thaums is spent between two things. First, I’m having to talk to all the prisoners about my role.

I give the other prisoners the skinny, finally. I hope that there are no traitors. I’m here trapped like they are, but I can drum for thaums, so they’re pretending that I’m a team member, until the thaums all come out, then they’ll probably kill all of us. I’m doing everything I can to find us a way out, but I’ve had to be quiet about it. Sharon is a sneaky one, and could potentially sneak in and duplicate someone. Someone may think they can get prisoner benefits by betraying us. I don't know how strong Charlie's power is, and he might be able to knock us all out, and then sub in Sharon. We're in a pretty precarious position.

It's almost good news that the prisoners are so beat down. They’ve mostly all been tortured to get them in here, and torture with magical regeneration is pretty scarring. I can’t expect any of them to help, but at least I can hope that they won’t cause problems for the escape attempt. More, they're not more depressed by the lack of speed in our escape.

The second thing I spend the week on is more fighting with the deja vu feeling of the time magic. I have the timing control on my audiomancy, and I spend most of the week trying to align that timing control with the time bubble’s effects. It doesn’t feel right at the beginning, but new practice never does. You have to learn what it’s supposed to feel like with practice, and then once you know how it should feel, then you can make it work, and it starts to feel right.

It doesn’t work. A week of fighting again produces precisely zero progress. At least by the end of the week, I’m convinced that my deja vu feeling doesn’t come from audiomancy speeding up sounds.

On the second surface visit, I have better communication capabilities, and the thaum battery slaves are ready to shelter. The second surface visit goes no differently than the first. That’s four days of real time our potential rescuers have had. What’s wrong? Why has no one come to save us yet.

I spend another week downstairs starting to get to know the slaves. I learn more that their spirits are really broken. Someone in the slavers’ group wasn’t a good person to begin with, and knew how to get slaves to accept their lot in life. Maybe they were cartel message-bringers or something? There was chopping off parts, and regrowing. There was sexual abuse of both sexes. There was both together. There was a lot of “obey or suffer” conditioning, and conditioning works. It’s the dictator's dream: remove the human ability to disagree.

Perhaps a real psychologist can fix it, but all I can do is get them to a place where they might become human again by escaping. The rest of the week, I spend again deep in the attempt to uncover the mystery of why I feel like the time magic is familiar.

The cycle repeats. If the slaves were less resigned to their fate, I might have a mutiny on my hands. As it is, they do as they’re told, and I fight through weeks of frustration both with the lack of rescue and the lack of progress on my understanding of something that I think I can understand.

On week four, I take a couple days off from trying to understand time magic, and practice my sleep trick. By week five, I manage to push the time to sleep down from four to three seconds. Checking to see whether it works after a stun, I practice with the stronger slaves, promising them bonuses if they touch me. They charge from forty yards away, I stun them, and then sleep them. It works. I can do both. My recorded loudness stun usually lasts half a second for combat-ready opponents. The weird thing is that the sound blast doesn’t get in the way of my binaural sleep-hijacking of their brain. Further experimentation shows that they’ll stay asleep as long as my sleep music stays running, but they’re just normally asleep after I stop, and can be awoken normally. Also, I can manage putting two people to sleep at a time pretty easily, and while three isn’t impossible, it’s also not guaranteed. I manage three maybe forty percent of the time.

Also, we test it on other critters that burrow: rats and moles and things. Turns out, I have to be able to find the things I’m working with, and different critters operate off different binaural brain bypass frequencies. Rats and moles are closer to one another than humans, but I have to pay attention to species and experiment if I want this to work on dogs or something.

Before my week six topside trip, I take the last half-hour to drum for fun. It's just warm ups. I haven’t touched my favorite tricky rhythm in a subjective year. More than that, even. 15/4 time, sixty BPM. But we’re playing sixteenths. Sixty beats per measure. I’ve got five limbs free to play. Left on three, six, nine. Right on five, ten, fifteen. Tail on the quarters. Right foot kicks every sixteenth.

k k L T R L k T L R k TL k k LR T k L k TR L …

Then I feel it.