Time passed, making very few impressions on Danielle’s memory. The alarm clock went off, and she awoke to take medicine, check her mana pools, drink water, and eat soup. She supposed she slept a great deal, and she also spent time staring at the moving colors which were probably a hallucination. Sometimes it was peaceful; sometimes it was boring.

  Small events stuck in her memory, like individual skits from a variety stream, disconnected from everything else.

  She remembered Zepher sending a Now Hear This in such an annoyed tone. “For those who can’t live without prying, yes I took a shaper Class. You may now address me as Elevated Storm Shaper Zephyr. Do not address me as ‘Hey McPherson.’ Do not contact me individually all day long to demand details. I’m trying to sleep! Message ends!” It was a full minute before he finally added, “Skill ends!!” and Danielle burst out in a fit of giggles that her roommates couldn’t account for, because the message had been directed to the Town council, not the hunting party.

  She remembered staring fixedly at her watch, because she needed to keep track of time but her brain wouldn’t process time if she let the watch out of her sight; she remembered it because that’s why she was watching when it came alive with mana and complex symbols, and she cried out, “Finally! Something to do!”

  She remembered a visit from Stranger Ranger, in which he told her to use as many of her Skills as she reasonably could, but listen to her roommates if they told her to stop using a particular one. She also remembered calling him Stranger Ranger to his face, and only remembering that wasn’t his actual name after she’d already asked why he was giving her such a strange look. The rest of the room had laughed (how many people were in there?) and Danielle had told him rather tartly, “Well that’s what you get for not introducing yourself!” but he still hadn’t introduced himself. He just told her to take lots of naps and he’d introduce himself when her head was back in working order.

  She did not remember making the checklist that told her what to do at medication time, but she followed it every time her watch chimed or gonged. She also sent a Now Hear This using a script in her Planner whenever her watch told her it was medication time. She didn’t remember writing the scripts either, but there was one for ‘chime’ medication times and one for ‘gong’ medication times. The Now Hear This scripts reminded people to take their own Fever-Ace, and only the gong script included reminders to use Boost Recovery and take a walk if the sick person was stable enough to walk.

  Danielle was stable enough to walk – didn’t she walk to the restroom after she took the Fever-Ace Heather gave her, every single time her watch chimed or gonged? It was on the checklist! She couldn’t go outside to walk around, though. She was also unable to go outside and set snares, which was a problem, because surely they were going to run out of meat for all these soups Heather was giving her. She couldn’t go outside at all, because a pair of men in white uniforms always turned her back at the door. They were polite and gentle but firmly refused to allow her outside.

  No one else would admit they were there.

  Danielle remembered one of them perching on the double footboards of her and Heather’s beds, which should have been an awkward position, but he made it look natural. He kept touching her head every so often, which was just strange, even for an invisible door guard. He occasionally spoke in mana, which was annoying, because no one else in the room could possibly hear him that way. He said that was fair, since they couldn’t see him either, but it made it very awkward to carry on a conversation.

  Heather was a blur in the background of the blur of the passing days; bringing cold water and medicine and the seemingly endless soup. It was remarkable soup – some of it tasted like sausage. Some of it had noodles! Danielle was too uncertain of her senses to question the mystery of the noodles. She was afraid she was hallucinating them.

  She wasn’t tracking time properly. System messages oozed slowly through / came fast and thick throughout the days. Most of them were Career Skills: Mana Diagnostics, Trim Meat, Transcribe, Gentle Harvest, Mana Shield, Grind Foodstuff. There was a pattern, but her mind wouldn’t hold onto it.

  Danielle only sort of remembered a visit from Ranger Flo, except that she looked very tired, and she asked Danielle to take everyone’s temperature and demonstrate a bunch of her new Skills. She tried out her Mana Diagnostics and found that the room was dense with mana, surely the nightmare of all sensible Insiders. She read Ranger Flo’s name and Classes from her system (three Classes, but Danielle couldn’t recall what they’d been). She tried out Infrasight and Ultrasight, which was a bit disappointing, because the hallucinatory colors swirling across her vision partly obscured the results. She even demonstrated the combination of Mana Veil with Active Camouflage, which Ranger Flo pronounced “uncanny.” She was sure Ranger Flo had done some other things, and given some instructions, but she couldn’t remember any of the details.

  She also did not remember repointing her absorption from Field Medic to General Enhancer, but she had a Planner notes page with a highly unrealistic emergency leveling plan for Field Medic, and when she checked the mana-to-level for the class, she was unnerved to find that she had passed the 500 mark and was in some danger of leveling it accidentally, like she had Basic Sneak.

  She discovered the notes on Thursday morning. The day started with the 6am medication reminder. Her watch woke her up and she sent out the Now Hear This, which woke up Heather, and started off the checklist. Take Fever-Ace, check. Use restroom, very much check. Drink a full canteen of water, in-progress. The canteen was on her bed when she got back from the restroom, which made it easy to get started. Check everyone’s temperature was next, so she attached a Numeric MedVet Thermometer number to everyone, including herself. Each person pointed out a particularly itchy spot for her to use Local Antihistamine on, while she was at it, and that was fine – she did her own itchiest spot while she was at it. Then it was drink water and wait for Heather to bring breakfast, and that’s when she started looking at her Planner and noticed the notes.

  Rereading the plan, she wasn’t sure all the Skills she had recorded as suggestions for either the level 2 or level 3 choices were actually, well, real. For that matter, she doubted they were all tier 2 or 3 if they were real. She looked up to ask Heather if she thought they had a chance of being real, and noticed (for the first time?) that she was pouring out cans of soup into a pot.

  “Is that – where did we get canned soup?” Danielle asked.

  “From the supply crates,” Heather said.

  “Whoa. The noodles are real. I thought I was hallucinating them!” Danielle watched as Heather put the pot over the camp stove. “That’s what was in all those baby crates?”

  “Soup, Fever-Ace, some anti-itch cream, some Urgent-C – did your mom ever give you Urgent-C when you were sick, back home? You keep asking if it’s Bottled Sunshine,” Heather said.

  “Urgency? I dunno what - oh. The fizzy vitamin C tablets? No. She made us drink Bottled Sunshine for the vitamin C, maybe that’s why it reminds me of it.” Danielle took a drink from her canteen. “Oh wait. Is that in my water? Right now? Kind of an orange flavor, not as strong as the real juice?”

  “Yep. I’m amazed how long it takes you to notice that,” Heather said. Danielle fell silent, and Heather quietly stirred the pot.

  A few minutes later, Danielle said, “I think I might have some memory issues. What day is it?”

  “Thursday morning,” Heather said. “The Rangers say you’ll probably stop being all loopy and random any day now. Everyone else’s fevers broke yesterday – I mean, in this room. Yesterday was a pretty rough day for the camp in general. I actually went out and helped check temperatures, because everyone needed checking yesterday.”

  “Oh. I don’t remember that at all,” Danielle said. She continued drinking her vitamin water with flavors, taking stock of her memories, then checked her own temperature again. “I’m at 99.6 – is that going down? It’s just a little lower than I was on – no wait, that was Zephyr.”

  “It is down, a little. You’ve been between 100 even and 101.5 for the last three days. With Fever-Ace.” Heather started dipping out mugs of soup, using Danielle’s extra mug as a ladle.

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  “Huh. Have I been hard to live with? With the loopy and random stuff, I mean?” she looked over at Sadie and Akari, who were both sitting on their beds drinking from canteens too. Everyone looked tired, even though they’d all gotten up less than an hour ago.

  “You’ve been OK, in a creepy-weird sort of way,” Sadie said. “You’ve slept a lot, but when you’re awake, you keep staring at your arm, or talking to people that aren’t there.”

  Danielle looked at her arms. “Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything weird on my arms now. Except the rash, I mean. I wonder if I was counting bumps?”

  “No,” Akari said, “it was weirder than that. You kept moving it all around, staring over it half the time instead of at it, acting like you had something you were trying to look at from every angle on, I dunno, the back of your hand or something.”

  “Oh, weird,” Danielle said. “I guess I was hallucinating?”

  “I dunno, it might be something real,” Sadie admitted. “You kept telling us it was your watch, even though you weren’t exactly looking at the watch. The thing’s been making those alarm sounds, though, so there’s something real going on with it.”

  Danielle looked at her watch, suddenly noticing the symbols floating around it. She could feel a mana structure around it, too – it felt like clockwork. There was an impression of rotating disks (gears?) and she could actually see how the symbols kind of lined up along the arcs and planes of the structure.

  “Ooh. It’s enhanced – that’s so cool! That General Enhancer Trait that was giving me problems at the Dome is how I’m seeing it.” Danielle rotated her arm, trying to see under the largest ‘gear.’ “It’s got, like a big gear-shaped bit in the middle, but there’s smaller parts above and below.”

  “That – that’s the thing, you’re doing it again,” Akari said.

  “What?” Danielle looked up at Akari, then down at her arm, held up and twisted to put the enhancement’s symbols in a better spot. “Oh. Oh, wow – right. You can’t see any of what I’m looking at – you’d need two separate abilities to get the picture of what I’m trying to, um, get the picture of. Cassy will be able to see it! Part of it, at least. Probably a lot of it,” Danielle guessed. “Do we know how she’s doing?”

  “She’s doing better,” Heather reported. “Her fever broke yesterday, too. And the guys. Akari went with me to check up on the party, and everyone’s doing fine. We were part of the early exposure group, but that means most of us are almost over it.”

  “We all had our worst day on Tuesday,” Akari said. “Except maybe you – you might have been worst on Monday, but then you didn’t start to come out of it the next day after it was worst, like the rest of us. Anyway, the rest of camp seems to have started hitting that phase yesterday. The Rangers actually set up a tent in their favorite spot in the middle of the road, because there were so many calls.”

  Heather sighed. “I have to go out once you all are settled and – ”

  “ – you’re not going out without me. I thought we resolved this yesterday!” Akari interrupted.

  “Fine! I have to go out after we get Danielle and Sadie settled for the morning, and go take temperatures. There are so many people who want checked that even the Ranger Healers would run out of mana if they had to do it all, so everyone in camp that has Detect Internal Temperature got called out to go door to door and take people’s temperatures. Gideon and Jordan turned out to be the only ones doing it for the ground floor of building 1, can you believe it? If that thing hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t have been anyone on the entire floor.” Heather brought the soup mugs over to the beds. “We’ve been sitting on the floor for this, to make sure spills don’t get in our blankets.”

  Danielle reluctantly slid out of bed and sat with her back against one of the legs. “Do I need to come, now that I’m awake and processing hopefully better than when I wrote some of this stuff in my Planner?” she asked.

  The others also moved down to sit on the tile with their backs against the beds. Heather passed out mugs to everyone before sitting down herself. “As usual, tell me if it’s not really enough,” she said.

  Danielle started drinking hers. “I haven’t been complaining about how much food we have, right?” she asked anxiously.

  “Nah, if anything we’ve had to be on your case to finish your one mug,” Akari said. “The fever doesn’t really leave you hungry for some reason. The mugs are a little smaller than the cans of soup, so we’re sharing out three cans between the four of us every meal, and squirreling away the extra cans.”

  “It’s chicken noodle, chicken-and-sausage jambalaya, and beef barley with veggies – six cans each,” Sadie said. “We’re saving one can of each every day, and this is the fourth day, so after dinner we’ll divvy the spare cans back to our own crates.”

  “Yeah, so everyone should get back one of each, and end with three of six used, even though we’ve all had four meals of each type,” Heather concluded. “The question is, will we all be well enough to go back to tomatoes and fish and snared stuff after that?”

  “Do we even have fish and tomatoes and stuff?” Danielle asked.

  “Thanks to you and me, we do,” Sadie said. “You used Dehydrate on some of the meat and berries on Monday and Tuesday, and I’ve been purifying stuff. Well, and to be fair, Akari was a trooper and cooked a bunch of meat Sunday evening and Monday afternoon.”

  “I think the System could tell I was worried about it, because when I got a mana pox induced Career Skill on Tuesday, it was Find Game Animals,” Akari said. “Nobody I’ve talked to before now mentioned having that – I don’t know if it’s one of those Skills you just can’t get on Decision Day, or what.”

  “Oh! Did the rest of you get Skills?” Danielle asked.

  “Yeah, I got something for snaring. Binding Net. I can weave a little net and the Skill will take care of making sure any animal that walks over it will get snared. It doesn’t go around the neck, so it’ll be more humane,” Sadie said.

  “And more reliable in general, and especially less likely to kill the animal by accident and waste its mana,” Akari added. “Not that being more humane isn’t a good enough reason.”

  Heather sighed. “Mine is Extract Oil. I can get oils from plants without going through long complicated extraction processes. Theoretically, it’ll let me have cooking oil, or at least medicinal essential oils, with a lot less work. The guidebooks say there’s just a lot more fat in animals than oil in plants, most of the time, though.”

  “The guidebook might be aimed at people without that Skill, though,” Danielle said. “Besides, you’re an Herbalist now, right? Medicinal oils should be a big deal for you.”

  “True. I don’t know, I might just be grumpy from being tired and knowing I still have to go out instead of napping all afternoon like you guys,” Heather said.

  “So why didn’t you answer me about if I should go?” Danielle asked.

  “You can go if you can get out the door, I guess,” Heather said.

  Danielle looked at Sadie and Akari. “Why would I not be able to get out the door?”

  Sadie said, “You’ve been walking at a slant.”

  “What?” Danielle looked to Akari.

  “Leaning against the wall, basically,” Akari said. “Not always, but most times. Also, every time that you’ve decided to go out before this, you’ve blown off or ignored all of our objections, opened the door, then come back in and claimed ‘the men in white uniforms’ won’t let you out of the room.”

  “Oh.” Danielle frowned into her mug. She swirled the soup to unstick a noodle from the bottom, then slurped it up. “I kind of remember the men in white uniforms. One of them keeps coming inside.”

  “We know,” Heather said tiredly. “You talk to him. You even complain about how he won’t talk so we can hear him. It’s obviously a hallucination.”

  “Well, I’m not hallucinating anymore, so obviously he won’t stop me at the door this time,” Danielle said. She glanced at the blank ceiling, just to confirm that she wasn’t seeing any hallucinatory clouds of color anymore. With nothing else to disguise it, she found to her dismay that she could still see the effect. It was a lot fainter than before, though.

  “If you can walk a straight line between the bookshelf and the counter, I’ll let you go to the door and try it,” Akari said. “You definitely have to stick with me and Heather if we go out, though – a lot of people are super annoyed at all your clock messages.”

  “Clock messages?” Danielle asked.

  “The “Now Hear This, it’s time to take Fever-Ace,” messages,” Sadie said. “The ones at noon and 6pm aren’t so bad, but the ones at midnight and 6am are upsetting people.”

  “Oh. That’s, uh – that does sound bad,” Danielle admitted.

  Heather slurped the last of her soup and stood up. “The Rangers said not to stop you. Part of the reason you were so bad on Monday is the Fever-Ace wore off overnight, and your fever got real high. You’re keeping people from getting a full eight hours of sleep all at once, but you’re also making sure everyone has a chance to keep their medications on track, and that’s a big deal. The whole camp’s eating soup rations this week anyway, so people can afford to take a nap if they need to.”

  Danielle started laughing. “What’s funny?” Sadie asked.

  “This – haha, oh man, I dunno if this is more funny or sad, but – this is our actual summer vacation!” Danielle said. She found herself cracking up even more, aware that it wasn’t that funny, but still unable to stop.

  “Our actual summer vacation will be after blueberry season is over,” Akari said, “when we use up our saved soup, and some dried blueberries and tomatoes probably, to take a day or two off just for extra rest and enjoyment. This is clearly sick time, not vacation time!”

  “Well. Yeah, OK. Anyway, I’m about done with my soup,” Danielle said, and poured the last noodle and chunk of carrot into her mouth with what looked like a half-spoonful of broth. She stood, trying not to look as unsteady as she felt, and set the mug down on the counter. “Let’s see if I can do that walking straight thing.” She went to the bookshelf, then walked back towards the opening in the counter.

  “Huh. That’s a lot better than Tuesday,” Sadie said. She got up and went to her trunk.

  Danielle went back to sit on her bed, trying to hide a certain shakiness in her legs. “Better enough, Akari?” she asked.

  “As long as you can promise to stay with us,” Akari said. “We’ll do the back side of the floor first and see how it goes. Worst case, you can rest with Cassy while Heather and I finish the front side.”

  Danielle nodded.

  “If you can get out the door,” Heather added.

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