“Rise and Shine, Kevin.”

I grab my sticks as I roll out of bed, throw my legs down and land on the drum stool. Memories of yesterday convince me to lead with Rush’s One Little Victory. I might be a little bit of a Peart-head. At normal speed, it’s a five minute song. I play it that way first. Brain dust starts to fall out.

Frodo, plus fifty percent tempo, I tell the voice in my head. It takes 3:20. And again.

Double speed takes two and a half.

250% speed takes a two minutes.

Three hundred percent tempo, and I start paying attention.

Four times speed and my drumsticks are moving. Seven times, and my eyes say the sticks blur. Echolocation can find them still when I switch Frodo to a ten millisecond pulse.

Ten ex speed, and I’m working hard, starting to sweat.

At thirteen times speed, I miss the entrance that normally happens at 3:10. I try again, and miss a stick at 45 seconds. I smile. Peart’s still kicking my ass and teaching me how to drum. So I practice. At the end of my hour, I can do it at fourteen times speed. I count that as one little victory.

“Kevin, it’s been an hour of waking up,” says my friend Alec.

Who knew that when we met the little green men, they’d be plants?

“Alfred. We made it.”

“You made it, Master Kevin. I provided nothing but background support.”

“Dude. A band is more than it’s lead singer. And this victory was ours.”

“You are too kind, sir. Perhaps now that you’ve had time to wake up, you should collect the spoils of war.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The Great Pumpkin has a point. I wander about the field ghosting monkey corpses. Eighteen normal sized monkeys yield a bit over half an o-thaum total, while the six large ones give me two more. The sasquatch is worth four and a half, to make my near death experience worth seven oranges. And I had one in my pocket before the fight, so I’m up to eight.

After collecting Thaums, I skin the six mid-sized monkeys. Six hours for six monkeys is a lot faster than I’ve done it in the past. And then there’s the beast. My Bowie knife won’t even get a good cut on its skin. However, I’ve got a baseball bat and a plant buddy.

It takes me half an hour with a baseball bat, but I manage to crack the big boy’s jaw and knock a canine out. With a three inch “blade”, my tests have it as both harder and sharper than my metal knife. I take a break and drum for the two hours it takes for Alec to return my new monkey-tooth knife. Phil Collins was a pretty solid drummer with Genesis.

My toothknife and I are able to skin the big lump in only four hours. And then it’s getting dark already. After a quick conference with Woody, I splurge for a grill, and cook myself a completely unnecessary giant-monkey-steak. First food I’ve had in a month. Kinda weird. Kinda good. Really good, actually.

With the monkey knife and the baseball bat, and a healthy dose of dark-immune echolocation, I’m able to take out the other upper canine, and the knife is sharp enough to remove several bones from the arm and leg. Courtesy of Alec, I end up with a new set of eight stronger bone escrima sticks, a nicely milled pair of bone baseball bats made from the monkey’s femurs, and nastily sharp oversized marlinspike made from its sharpened, three-foot humerus bone. Even better is the bone-and-tooth knife that’s nicer than the wood-and-tooth one I used to cut up the monkey. As a bonus, he even gets me an axe made of bone and sharpened teeth.

The big monkey’s skin is too hard and heavy for most uses. The ever so helpful plant offers to make a set of football pads or armor plates, but I turn him down. We agree to make a harder helmet though, same design as before, and three pair of hard black leather shoes that I can run in.

We duplicate my leather outfit twice from the medium monkeys, and I’m lookin like a new world fashion icon for leatherwear. Or a member of Kiss minus the makeup. We'll call it Alec chic: fashion from a different dimension. I keep the rest of the leather in my pockets.

Along the way, Alec asks nicely if I’d fillet a couple of the little monkeys, and drag one of the trees that Biggie Big knocked down into the hut. I use my new axe to finish cutting the tree off it's base, finish Alec's requests, and then notice how low I am on t-juice.

So I head back to drumming. I play 2112: the album, not the song; Then Clockwork Angels; Hemispheres and then Roll the Bones; Signals and Grace Under Pressure. Permanent Waves is crashing around me as dawn breaks.