A week later, we’re getting close to Mike’s camp, and we have to start scouting. It takes us several days to figure out how to do that effectively.

I have enhanced hearing, and Mu has enhanced vision. I’m quite speedy, and Mu has his portals. We seem like a team tailor made for a spy mission, or else if Danae had an enhanced voice, we could be three monkeys. Unfortunately, working together is always harder than it looks. It’s kinda like jamming together. Mostly, you can’t do anything interesting until after you get a bit of a feel for the other player.

Mu and I spend several days learning to spy on things.

According to Mu the geek, a normal person without assistance can see a quarter at a distance of about a hundred yards. He talked more, and said something about arc-minutes or some such, but it turns out that better hearing doesn’t make me any better at listening. Also, I’m much better at actually tuning people out.

Anyhow, the arc-minute-thing is awfully close to the limits of human vision. Any less than that and you’re no longer able to see clearly. We test it out, and it is basically true. I can’t see a quarter at 200 yards. Heck, I can barely see a dinner plate at 200 yards. Neither can Danae.

So we start testing with quarter-sized portals. Mu makes the far end of his portal 200 yards up in the air, facing up and down. I try to echolocate through it. It’s harder than it sounds. Once we have invisible space holes, then doing my radar thing through the hole is next. It’s hard to sear through it , because I’m used to using my whole ‘hawk to get responses back, and this is just a 1 inch wide space.

It takes almost two whole days before I can construct the right sound-magic to hear well on my radar. I have to sound bubble myself, then build a sound-tunnel to the edge of the portal so I can ping properly, and then listen for the response with my ‘hawk right in the way.

Eventually I get to a point where we can open a portal 200 yards in the sky, ping, wait a second and change for the ping to bounce back, then close the portal. Then Mu moves the portal somewhere else, and does the same thing visually. By comparing our notes, we can do a pretty bang-up job of identifying terrain.

Being as we’re now in a Jason Bourne spy flick, we have to seriously consider countermeasures. There’s only 2 ways we can think of where the ping would be detected. First, you can both be looking up, and have at least double the normal human visual acuity. Mu’s got better than that, but with less than about double, you won’t see bupkis. Second, you can be doing radar like I do, and have your ping happen in the right second. If you’re not doing that, and barring anything crazy like magical spatial awareness, then no one will notice the scrying.

It takes almost another full day to learn to communicate what we saw though. I’ve never been good at drawing maps, and Mu just wasn’t good at drawing. Within a day, though, we get to a point of being able to communicate quickly about what we saw.

We try it a few different ways and eventually settle on each drawing a separate map, sharing both of them, and letting Danae check out the differences. She’s not thrilled with our extensive planning, but it’s a lot better than going in unprepared.

In the days Mu and I are working on better visibility, Danae decides to give us a boost in our combat capabilities. She makes hair armor for us both, to match hers. You’d think that wouldn’t be all that impressive, but she layers the stuff, weaves it together, and she’s spent most of her upgrades on making her hair to be stronger than steel. The weight is magnificent for the protection.

The hair-suits look like full suits of armor for knights, only made out of hair. Now Mu and I can be knights of the hair cabal, while D’s fighting style makes her the knight of the hair cable. For some reason, D. doesn’t appreciate my naming. Mu loves it though. He starts putting together a song to the tune of Monty Python’s “We’re Knights of the Round Table.” Danae threatens to string us both up when we start singing.

The armor bends in the right places, doesn’t in the right other places, and provides amazing protection. We test first with my sticks, and our tests suggest that if someone’s wearing Danae’s hair armor, my sticks simply can’t do anything to them except poke them in the eye. That’s more or less how we got helmets with eyeslots after a couple demonstrations of face-shots with my super-speed.

The armor doesn’t itch, and after mishap where Mu wanted to take it off, and Danae was busy, she even set it up so we could take it off ourselves. Putting it on though is about a hundred times easier with her around than without.

And now we’re back to the basic danger point in our weapon-choices. I don’t have anything that can actually damage this hair-armor. Honestly, neither does Mu. Even his pretty robust spear doesn’t do much against the puncture-resistant steelhair that D has. If someone else has something similar, we’ll have to rely on D. to do the work of fighting them. Maybe I can sonic-scream them, but that’s about all I’ve got, and I think Mu has even less.

Then again, a couple more spars worth of fighting, and Mu figures something out. He can use portals to drop people. If he makes a big portal, ten feet across, and you don’t know what’s going on, he can drop you from 100 yards up. That’s awful hard to defend against if you don’t have wings, hair that can cross the portal so you don’t fall in, or super-speed. It wouldn’t work well against Danae or me if we were paying attention but against most of the other people we’ve seen, it’s a pretty powerful pancake-pulverizer.

Also, I think my strength is getting better. The stupid exercises that Mu has got us doing are actually working. My speed might even be going up a little bit, now that I’m actively working on practice. We are still managing an hour or two a day of actual exercise, working on speed, endurance, and strength.

Time music has no such win. I keep trying. I keep failing.

Then the week is up, and we’re getting ready to face Mike and his crew, to free the slaves he’s accumulated.