Our progress toward Albuquerque was slow.

At a little over 200 miles away, the drive would have taken only a half day before monsters menaced America. For a few days, we’d been making really good time, but now we were back down to about twenty miles per day, sometimes less. It was agonizing.

What made it particularly frustrating was the unevenness of our speed. We might have a clear hour or two where the only thing slowing us down was our own efforts to steer around pavemimics and the need to stop and clear Monstrosities from our wheels. Then, we might encounter a group of survivors embattled with a wostrich herd and have to backtrack, luring some of the herd away and losing all the progress we’d made.

Roads were sparse in this area of the country, so retracing our steps and finding another route could easily add dozens of miles to our trip.

We actually got stalled out for nearly a day just south of a city named Las Vegas - not the famous one, a much smaller place in New Mexico - where a huge pileup had blocked both sides of the highway. Our atlas didn’t show any way to get around, so we spent a day or so stuck in place, using our supernatural abilities and engineering know-how to shift tons of metal off the road.

The new monster had appeared by then, little slime-creatures.

For once, I was the most useless one in our party. Byron could set them aflame fairly easily, Davi could knock them away, and at least John and Kurt could pelt them with Missiles from a distance, but I had to get up close and personal to fight the monsters, a frustrating and painful experience. The only way to take them out with physical damage was a pinpoint strike on a near-invisible core floating in the middle of the monster’s mass. Miss, and your strike did nothing except coat you in a goo that stung horribly and made my skin break out in an instant rash.

Even if I managed to nail the elusive core, I’d still have to deal with splashes of slime for a few seconds before the monster’s corpse dissipated.

After several tries, I categorically refused to fight them any more, breaking off and evading whenever one headed my way.

“Byron!! Get it off me!”

“Aww, does the big brave warrior need the mage to save him?”

“YES!”

Byron formed his hand into a gun shape and shot out a blast of flame, then brought it up so he could pretend to blow out his fingertip. “You can stop running now, Vince. Don’t worry, I took care of the mean, nasty slime.”

“It was a strategic retreat! You’re better against these guys.”

“Of course it was.”

I grumbled, but not too loud. He could be as smug as he wanted as long as he torched the slimes for me.

We left towns alone, but continued to pick up survivors we found on the road and carry them with us until we found the next Shop. Davi continued interviewing everyone we met and filling out her notebook of abilities and synergies, complete with continually-updated recommended “builds” for each member of our group.

Byron got ahold of a notebook of his own, and was grabbing any measurement tools he could that still worked. His synergies let him sense temperature, making a thermometer unnecessary, but he looted several precise mechanical scales and a collection of more esoteric instruments from a high school science lab, then traded a stack of rations with a hitchhiker in exchange for their windable mechanical watch.

With these, he set out to do his best to track, quantify, and graph as precisely as possible the changes we’d undergone and the strength of our abilities.

“Aliens can destroy civilization, break every computer, but they can’t end Byron’s love affair with spreadsheets,” I muttered to Davi.

She rolled her eyes at me.

“What?” I asked. “You know I’m right.”

“It’s true,” she admitted. “But tell me you’re not curious to see what he comes up with.”

“That’s why I’m saying this to you, not him.”

Davi laughed, which had been my goal all along. We were staying busy, and focused on the future, but she still seemed quiet and more withdrawn. It made sense, but I still worried about her.

What Byron found out was interesting. First of all, there didn’t seem to be a strict mathematical pattern to our increased strength.

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“Unless our measurements are way off and we’re making lots of mistakes, it seems like they just pick an amount of strength we get per level, and it might be the same increase for more than one level in a row. Starts at about a 50-pound increase at level 2, then 75 for the next couple, then 100 pounds per level. Best as I can tell. It’s probably not exactly 100 pounds, but… eh, close enough.”

Abilities, on the other hand, did seem to get stronger in predictable patterns. Not every ability followed the exact same pattern, but whatever pattern an ability had for increasing in strength, it followed without deviation. Even better, many abilities seemed to get stronger exponentially.

“Telekinesis, for example,” Byron said. “None of us have it yet, but we’ve talked with people. At its base strength, people can lift one object of just under ten pounds. At 400% synergy, they can lift four objects of about 40 pounds. Well, more like 35, but still. That’s sixteen times as much as someone with only 100% synergy.”

“It’s weird that it’s in increments of 10 pounds,” Davi said.

Byron shrugged. “Probably just coincidence. Probably 12 snarfblatts or whatever weird unit they use is a little under 10 pounds, and then 144 is a little over 100 pounds. Next time we pick up someone with Telekinesis, I’m going to do some tests. I bet I can calculate the exact value of their alien pounds, even if I don’t know the name of the unit.”

“Oooh. I don’t know what we’d do with that information, but it would be cool to know,” Davi said.

Byron hesitated. “I… actually don’t know what good the information would be either. I’m sure it’ll be useful eventually.”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Just knowing that abilities often grow exponentially is invaluable. When I take a strength-enhancing ability, maybe I really can moonlight as an airship engine. That said… we really need to quantify my regeneration and skeletal reinforcement.”

Byron winced. “The minute I figure out a way that doesn’t involve torturing you, I’ll let you know.”

“Ehhh, I can fix any problems quickly.”

“Well, then you can break your own damn arms! Don’t get on my case when you can’t do it either.”

For my sixth ability, I’d taken Healing Touch. Davi didn’t have any data on how it would synergize with my particular Biological Augments, but she’d found people with other augments who’d taken the ability and the synergy had never been lower than 50%. On top of that, almost all my abilities were passive. I could fight to my utmost all battle and still have energy at the end to pull one of my friends back from the brink of death, if necessary. The ability made a ton of sense with my build.

I’d initially been planning to wait longer to take it, but Twinkles’ death had shaken all of us. When the wostrich had popped the windshield out shortly thereafter, we’d gotten lucky that John hadn’t been too concussed to understand the need to heal himself. If it had knocked him a little loopier, we would have been shit outta luck. None of us had commented directly on the close call, but the relief people had shown when I’d announced my plans - and the meaningful glances thrown John’s way - suggested that I hadn’t been the only one who’d noticed our near brush with disaster.

We were forced to backtrack once again. I wasn’t even sure what had ruined the road this time. Maybe some messed up ability? If so, it must have been a strong one, or maybe something more than one person had. A huge section had been raised into a wall just north of a city called Tecolote. An unclaimed Points Siphon had glittered behind it, but the moment we’d left Frank and stepped toward it, people had popped their heads over the edge of the wall and an unhealthy-looking green cloud had appeared in our path. We’d climbed back in and turned around rather than confront a hostile force when the road was impassable anyhow.

We’d had to drive almost all the way back to the previous roadblock and then detour southeast. That meant we’d made fewer than 20 miles of forward progress in about three days, and now we were stopped cold, waiting to find out what new monster or hazard Day 22 would bring to us.

“This is ridiculous,” Kurt said. “It’ll take us over half a year to get home at this rate by driving. It might be impossible if things get any worse. I know I was against the blimp plan but… anything has to be better than this. And now we’re stopped. Shouldn’t whatever-it’s-going-to-be have appeared by now? I half expect them not to do something new, just to watch us wait around like idiots.”

“It’s gonna be something,” Byron said with certainty. “Let’s just sit tight until we find out what. One disaster at a time, right? If this watch isn’t slow, we’ve got about ten minutes more to wait. ”

When the moment came, a message filled my mind:

Congratulations! If you’re hearing this, you’ve survived the first twenty-one days of the Earth Maffiyir!

You have reached the first mandatory trial! You must pass the trial to be permitted to continue in the competition.

Contestants will be able to challenge this trial in groups of up to four. The difficulty will scale with the number of challengers, so think carefully before you choose to enter together.

Trial summons will be issued throughout the next three days, beginning immediately after the conclusion of this announcement. When you receive a summons, you will be allowed 38 seconds to place your skin in contact with other contestants’ skin. When your timer reaches zero, all contestants sharing skin contact with you or a person you are touching will be transferred to a shared trial. If you attempt to bring more than four challengers to a single trial, only the first contestant you touch will accompany you.

Face the challenges before you to grow in strength and earn rewards. Good luck!

“Shit, already?” I asked.

“Beember said eight to eleven days for the thing where everyone has to fight,” Davi said. “This would be eight days.”

I groaned. “I was hoping it would replace the Novelty challenge a few days from now. Now there will probably be one of those too.”

“There’s a bigger problem,” Byron said. “Did you notice what it said? ‘Groups of up to four.’ There are five of us.”