Precisely one hundred and sixty minutes later, Alec stops me with, “You’re full, right?”

I check myself, and say, “Think so. How did you know?”

“As an administrator, I have a heads up display. Your Thaum-fullness just ticked to 100%.”

“Is there any way for me to get that kind of news? I’ve never been good at noticing much of anything when I’m drummin’. And I guess I’m skinny ‘cuz I forget to eat a lot."

“We can duplicate your hunger sense into a different sense. Taking the hunger sense away is against system guidelines, but adding a second sense is easy enough. Like the alarms you’ve been putting on your timekeeper. We could give you a heads up display like mine for your Thaum levels."

“Dude. No headsup for me. AR shit makes me sick. I like the bralarm idea. Can I set it. How much does it cost?”

“Consider it a gift for your assistance with my research.”

“You grow girl! So what’s the scoop? What’d you find out?”

“Do you remember a bit back, I told you that it takes 6 hours of rest to gain enough energy to collect energy for a day of work?”

“Uhhhh. Vaguely. I was kinda zonin’ there."

“Well, you just gained a full day of energy in 2 hours and 40 minutes. Something is definitely odd here. Normal Thaum absorption is atmospheric thaum density times absorption rate.”

“Two-forty is two and a quarter times as fast 6 hours”

“Quick calculation for a human. Do you have a math background, Kevin?”

“Nah. That’s timing, not math. I always got the timing right, even before Frodo.”

“Interesting model. Very well. I was wondering if we could do further experimentation?”

“I gotta prepare for Night of the Living Monkey, part III. What’s it worth to you, Fern-inator man?”

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“In addition to the configurable mental alarm, and all the Thaums you’ll be able to acquire by pulling coins from your ears, I can offer a monetary reward.

“And they said money didn’t grow on trees. How much?”

“I can offer two o-Thaums for another day of testing”

“Do you negotiate? Two’s not enough. How about tree?”

“Your negotiation approach is pathetic. And your jokes are exhausting. Three is acceptable if you spend a full 24 hours on experiments I propose with drumming. Nothing dangerous.”

“Deal. For the next 24 hours, I’m a slave on your plant-ation”

We drain my thaums again, this time to about 80%, and funny devices start appearing around the hut. Alec calls them Thaumometers. First test says that it’s not just me absorbing stuff fast. It’s more thaums in the atmosphere.

Second test has me outside the hut drumming. It’s not the hut. Third test has me practicing my echolocation for an hour further away. I got a tiny bit better at see-hearing, or "searing" things but there was no effect on the thaumic density in the region.

Test four had me drum a bit, and the thaumic density was up. When I stopped drumming, the density dropped, if not immediately. Test five was on escrima. And test six was escrima hitting something hard making noise. Alec bought me one of those kung fu wooden dummies so it’d click when I hit it. Nuthin’.

Seventh test was air-drumming. No dice. Eighth was slap-drumming the knees. That had some impact. Acapella drum-sounds had a somewhat better impact. But neither was good like the real thing. The taiko drums worked as well as the drum kit. The marching toms did too. Using the Kali sticks to play drums on the kung fu stick guy had an effect like the two partial success. Combining leg-drumming and acapella had a higher effect, but still not what I got from any of the drumsets. Maybe the most interesting was that arrhythmic drumming did nothing.

Along the way, thaumometers weren’t enough. Alec was pulling out Thaumopiles to measure Thaumic flux, Thaugnet dust to measure fields and flows and stuff. Shit, I’m not a scientist. I played my drums a lot, and learned a couple important things.

First, and again, this is according to Dr. Max Plant over there, I’m past flow states when drumming, and into fugues. Dunno what that means, but I guess I absorb Thaums a lot faster when drumming hard. Fifty percent better than what most folks get from meditation or sleep.

Second, when I’m drumming, something something sonic suction. I guess it’s like quadcar lift. Run some air past a wing-shape, and it creates a suction that pulls the wing up. Yeah. Same shit, but with sound waves and thaums. I’ve got something like a twenty yard radius of extra thaumic energy, spiraling somehow towards the center where the density goes from normalish at the edges, to fifty percent higher than normal right at the drums.

Plant-A … there’s gotta be some way to stick an “nnn” sound on the end of that and call him a banana; He said that rhythms might be able to impact that, but he’d been unable to run enough tests, and our 24 hours were up. I even heard something that might be excitement in his voice as he said, “Your coins, sir. I will need to synchronize with my cohort. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were news to all of us”