"So I need you to take over setting up the defenses for me," I told Juana. "We’ve kind of got a lot more than we’d planned. I need to get back out there and help Grandpa."

"What am I supposed to do with all this?" Juana spun in place, staring at our piles of ill-gotten loot.

Our 24 hour timer was up. The node officially belonged to the Misfits Guild. Now the portal was open and our small army of crafters and expert farm level miners streamed in.

Grandpa and the rest of the party were out stopping the creep waves that had started spawning just as soon as the node converted. There were eight different spawn points around the island — the same locations we had cleared during the initial phase. Now every thirty minutes, waves of skeleton pirates, cannibal pigs and other mobs spawned and began moving toward our base.

As soon as we got the defenses set, we could start letting the turrets and other automations handle the creep. That would free us up for better things, like hunting rare spawn. It was also the main way to make money here in phase 2. Sure, we got an hourly income from the node, but each creep killed by our automated defenses was worth a soul coin bounty. No coin for killing them ourselves, which seemed backward, but it did motivate us to get everything up.

Juana had come in with the first wave to help set up the defenses. She had a knack for that sort of thing. In preparation for phase two, she had managed to acquire an [Organize Base] skill. We hadn't had a chance to try it out yet, but this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

She and all our farming and crafting staff had a bright yellow tag over her head: [Non-Combat Miner]. Our bid for this map had specified only 15 combatants. Team Twofeather, Team Mongoose and Team Ragtag would be allowed to engage other combatants and the "creep" that spawned to attack our base. Nobody else would be able to fight: if they tried, their abilities would fizzle out. On the other hand they also couldn’t be harmed.

That restriction was lifted for the special resource nodes. If those challenges included, say, killing feathered dinosaurs for their leathery hides and meat, the non-combat miners would be able to help — and the dinosaurs would be after them in return.

"So we get these defenses set up and then what, I have to babysit them for the rest of the phase? What are you going to be doing?"

"We'll keep a small crew on hand here to make sure that we are ready to defend against surprises. But the main use for the mission teams is going to be going and taking down rare spawns or securing resource nodes or fighting against other teams."

"How often is that likely to happen?"

I ticked off the likely scenarios on my fingers. "If they come to try to take our node away, if we decide to try to take theirs, or apparently there are events that can pop up that will require at least one 5-member group from each nearby claimed node to go and fight over it."

"What happens if you don’t go?

"Your node goes back into claiming mode and all of your automated defenses shut down for 24 hours until you've proved it again."

"Ouch," Juana said. "Yeah, that wouldn't be good."

"As soon as we've got some of these defenses set up, I'm going to see about scouting out a couple of the nearby resource nodes. There's some sort of school of fish close by that says it drops meat, as well as scales and bone that can be used as crafting materials."

"Then let's get on it," Juana said, looking at what my team and I had already set up.

We had the crates arrayed as a kind of outline of the defenses we were going to make. We’d laid out a circle around the node, 10 meters in diameter, which was a distance we’d gotten from the Beginner’s Guide to Constructing Your Phase Two Outpost.

Juana pointed. "My Organize Base skill is suggesting a couple tweaks. You’re building turrets every eight feet, but if we spread them to ten feet we’ll have room to put in elemental cannons in between. Otherwise we’ll just have to move all the turrets once we can afford the cannons."

I had shared the outpost guide with her before starting phase two. It sounded like Juana had been studying up as hard as I had.

"We can do that. I only planted the first couple turrets. There’s so much to do, I can’t quite figure out what to do first."

"That’s my job," Juana said. "Planting buildings has a cooldown, so let’s get one started. Let’s start with the barracks, then the miner respawn facility."

"You think it’s worth the cost right off?" I’d been eyeing the barracks myself. It was going to cost us nearly all of the soul coins we had earned in the first 24-hour period, and that was with using some of Veda's outside mods to get it up to strength.

Juana nodded. "It'll let up to 10 team members at a time rest. Anyone who rests in the barracks gets a buff to their effectiveness, as well as a small health pool increase for the next 12 hours. The really important thing is you can rest there for 4 hours, and it has the effect of a full night's sleep. So for our mission teams, it'll cut our downtime in half."

"All right, but I think we need the map next, not the respawn point." I led her out into the second defensive ring, another ten meters beyond the first, where we had a box unpacked and ready to go. "It's a Class C structure, and not too expensive, but it will let us see the vicinity around us. If someone launches an attack on somebody else's node, that will be shown. If somebody claims another node, that'll be shown, too. Right now, it's limited to about 100 nautical miles around."

"Upgrades aren’t too expensive," Juana said, her eyes unfocusing for a second as she probably consulted the guide. "How big is this map? How many other parties?"

"Veda passed on a list of participants. There are 27 major conglomerates with multiple teams each, 103 smaller organizations like Veda's, and 16 of what she calls NGOs, non-government organizations, I think. I'm not entirely clear. The way she talked about it, some of them sounded like religious orders."

"How many other human-backed teams?"

"Well, there's a lot of miners and crafters being hired on to do farming. And, uh, three human-lead teams."

"That’s it?" Juana’s eyebrows raised. "Really?"

"We wouldn’t be here if Veda hadn’t told us to train by running missions. Sounds like most of the galactics were planning on bringing in their own people all along. I bet most sponsors steered their miners away from missions."

"You might be right," Juana said. "Ok, barracks, then map, then respawn. How does this communications array strike you as our fourth build?"

"I’m not sure how necessary that's going to be. Since everyone here is part of the same coalition, we have our guild chat to fall back on. We can talk to Veda, since she's our coalition sponsor."

"It says here it allows for communication with rival factions."

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"So?" I said. "Why do we want to talk to them? We're trying to take their stuff."

Juana sighed. "Shad, you're a nice guy, and it sounds like you're really good in the gunslinging field. But you really don't have a future as a politician, do you?"

"I sure as hell hope not."

"It's going on my list for when we can afford it."

"Let’s get the bunkhouse building, then you can get out of my hair while I start setting up turrets."

I grinned. "I like bunkhouse a lot better than barracks. Bunkhouse it is. We'll set up a chow wagon outside of it, stocked with as much fresh home-cooked food as we can. We'll have to see if we can persuade your mom to come through and make us dinner sometimes."

Growing the bunkhouse was pretty darn cool. Juana opened the box containing it, and a system message popped up for us both to read saying, [Do you want to activate this building?

Yes/No.

Warning. Building cannot be moved once it has been created. Building must be destroyed and recreated.

Warning. This building is capable of taking six expansions. If you place this building in a location where it cannot expand, those expansion slots will be unusable.]

I had already known this and had marked out with a couple of stakes from my inventory the edges of the bunkhouse's eventual footprint. I told the system, "Yes," and leapt back as the bunkhouse sprang into existence.

It folded up out of the crate and rapidly expanded, reminding me of one of those bouncy houses at a kid's birthday party, inflating from a plastic bag to, well, a plastic bag shaped like a castle or something.

"I’m going to work on the turrets," Juana announced, as I considered our new building. The bunkhouse was square, squat, and concrete gray. That was no fun. I accessed its properties through the system and played around until I had a long, low, one-story building with wood slat siding, and a shingled roof. I'd even added a porch with a rocking chair on it. The rocking chair didn't offer any kind of buff. It was just for the ambiance.

I stepped up onto the porch, then opened the door. It creaked satisfyingly under my hand. I stepped inside. Five stacks of bunk beds lined the small room with a little washroom at the far end. There was a cheerful braided rug on the floor, and each of the beds was covered in a homey scrap quilt. Pegs by each bunk offered a place to hang up a coat or a hat or what have you.

I nodded appreciatively. "That's more like it," I said aloud.

By the time Grandpa got back from making the rounds of the island, killing creep as it spawned, Juana had the first set of turrets up. She had also sorted through our stolen goods and located a pair of elemental cannons which she mounted by the front gates, programming them with an icy attack that would debuff enemies, making them move slower as they wound their way through our defenses.

We had built the bunkhouse, the map table, and a simple crafter's shed that would allow our farmers and crafters to start using the materials that they would hopefully collect.

I had resisted adding any particular tools, like the leather curing racks or the fish drying racks that Juana suggested, saying we would get those when we knew exactly what kind of mats we had to work with. I reminded her we had a strict budget.

We also had the miner respawn point under construction. That was inside the inner circle for the very simple reason that it had a 24-hour cooldown on construction. If we lost this one, it would be 24 hours before we could build another one. That made it a vulnerable point that enemies would be looking to attack. We were out of money for now, but with the turrets coming online, we could start killing creep here at the outpost and really make bank.

Grandpa looked around appreciatively, then settled into the rocking chair. "Starting to look downright homey," he said.

"We should have enough of the defenses up in another hour to let them start taking over," I said. "I'd like to take a team out to check out the fish resource and see about getting that harvested."

"Good thought," he said. He looked around. "Where's Sage?"

"I thought she was with you," I said.

Grandpa stood back up from the rocking chair. "No," he said grimly. "She wasn't."

We pinged her in chat. A minute later, she replied, What is it?

Where are you, young lady?

Out foraging, she replied. I could practically hear the defensiveness in her voice now. She knew very well that when Grandpa started slinging around the young ladies, she was in trouble.

Ping the map where you are, Grandpa said.

A minute later, it lit up. There were three green dots in that area and no red ones, so I relaxed.

Who's with you?

Dwight and Amity. And Mitch.

Dwight and Amity were the two best crafters in our coalition. Mitch was one of the new recruits from Team Ragtag. My suspicions went through the roof. What are you up to?

We were trying an experiment. It kind of worked. We're on our way back now. She stopped talking in chat.

Grandpa and I looked at each other. I shook my head. "I know there's respawns now, but that doesn't mean I like her wandering off and doing whatever she likes."

"No, indeed," Grandpa said. "We're supposed to be a team here."

"I'll remind her of that."

A couple minutes later, Sage marched back into camp. Dwight and Amity followed her, almost bent double under the weight of the heavy loads they were carrying. Each of them had a wooden yoke over their neck with a pair of baskets dangling from each. Mitch trailed along behind, looking smug

Grandpa and I hurried over to meet them. "What's this?"

"Well, I noticed when we were fighting the pigs that they had buckets set up by the trees with some sort of pegs in the trees," Sage said defensively. "And I thought later, 'That looked funny.’ It reminded me of how people make maple syrup, but these aren't maple trees, so I was wondering what they were. And then I had an idea, so we went to look. Mitch agreed with me," she added.

Mitch nodded. The Canadian redneck was a [Tapper], which apparently was explosives focused but with a maple tree and syrup theme. "Got a nice bonus by using my non-combat skill on the taps!"

Dwight set down his baskets carefully. He stepped back, and I took a look inside. The basket was absolutely full of a milky white liquid. "What is that?" I asked. "Palm juice?"

"Better than that." Dwight's eyes were shining. "That, my friend, is rubber in its natural state. The trees on this island produce rubber."

"What?" I would have killed for the map right now. "It didn't say anything about that on the map back on the ship. The trees weren't marked as a resource."

"They weren't marked as a resource deposit," Sage said patiently. "It doesn't mean we can't harvest other resources. It just means it's not something you have to fight for. Well, not if you've already cleared out the NPC camps, that is." She sounded triumphant. "There are so many things we can make out of this. Better gear for everyone. Improved weapons."

"She's not exaggerating," Dwight said. "This really will give us an edge. And Mitch’s bonus will really help out. If he can come by once a day and refresh it, we’ll be swimming in the stuff. Rubber's incredibly versatile, and it's hard to replace with anything else. Nobody's found a rubber source in any of the farming levels before this."

"Don't you have to refine it or something?"

"Yes," Sage said. "So look through the listings and figure out how we can build a rubber refinery station."

Juana called over, "I've already found it. The pattern's in the database. We can adapt one of the basic crafting stations to refine rubber, but it's a pretty big footprint item. It's a Class B. I think it's going to have to go in the second ring. And it's expensive. We won't be able to afford it until sometime tomorrow at the earliest."

"That's fine," Sage said cheerfully. "That just gives us all time to start collecting now."

Grandpa and I shared a glance. "Sage," I said, "you need to let us know about this sort of brainwave. It was a great idea. Really valuable. I'm glad that you thought of it. But we need the team to be in on it."

"The team," she said scornfully. "What team? You mean you and Grandpa want to vote down anything that you don't like the sound of?"

"That's not quite how I meant it," I protested.

"You sure it isn't?"

"We definitely would have gone after the rubber," I said. "Just maybe not yet."

Sage put her hands on her hips. She looked me in the eye. "Look, Shad, I know I'm twelve. I know you still think of me as your little sister. I am your little sister. But right now, right here, we're equals. You need to get that through your thick head. I am as much a member of this team as anyone else here. Would you have scolded Dwight if he'd gone off on his own?"

"Well, hell yes," I snapped. "The point of being a team is that nobody goes off on their own."

"And how much did you ask the rest of us before you ran into that pig camp and blew yourself up?" she demanded.

There was a long, awkward silence. Juana said carefully, "He did what?"

"It was a strategic move," I mumbled.

"He triggered Dwight's big boom bomb while he was holding it," Sage said in disgust. "Just 'cause he was in a rush to get back to the ship and look at the map."

Juana sighed. "All right. That isn't such a dumb thing to do, as it sounds, I guess. But really, Shad, you should listen to your sister."

I turned on her. "What, you too?"

"All right," Grandpa said. "Enough bickering. I’m recalling the team. Next creep wave spawns in twenty minutes and we’re going to test just how good the defenses are." He grinned at me. "You get to stand outside the final gate and stop ‘em with your face if the turrets don’t work. I’ve got a bet going with Frank that you die three times today."