“Morning, Alec,” I say when the song finishes.

“Good morning, Kevin. I am pleased to note that you do actually remember my name.”

“I figure using it twice in a month is enough, right? So, what now? What happens. Do I need to say the magic words again?”

“No. We will open a path in the forest, and then begin shrinking this clearing. You'll be forced out on the path. But you have all day.”

“That was one tough motherfucker of a monkey I had to fight there. Was it the same trial for everyone? How many folks passed? Survived, I guess”

“Yes, everyone fought the same set of monkeys. Only about five percent of the adult humans from your old world succeeded.”

“So, we’re down to what, a six hundred million people? From twelve billion?”"

“No. You’re down to a bit under half a billion adult survivors. The three billion children in the world have been separated, cared for emotionally and physically, and are being allowed to grow to maturity using time magic. By and large, they have not been tested yet. The resource cost of such extensive chronomancy would have been too high.”

“I thought a third of the world was under 18.”

“The physical maturity cutoff we used was 15.”

“That’s a lot of dead people, A-bomb. A lot of dead kids.”

“The people of your old world were optimized for the challenges of the external strength dimension. They were not optimized for this internal strength dimension. You were not either. Only your discovery of the thaumic rhythm connection and your frankly amazing practice ethic kept you alive.

“This dimension does not exist to provide edification for the participants. It exists as a trial to see which experiments are deserving of interdimensional community. And which are failures, and should be recycled.

“Most humans, while supporting the improvement of humans’ external strength in the prior dimension, were simply not worth keeping alive at the greater resource cost in this dimension, much less higher ones. In this world, it’s strengthen or die”

“That’s harsh, man.”

“I believe the common misquote of the movie is: You’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

“Where’s the yellow brick road taking me, then, oh great Ozzie Hooker?”

“Are you referring to the kerosene plant? The ozothamnius hookeri?”

“Shit man, I dunno. It was my favorite plant name from botany class. Like, did the scientist naming it really enjoy his time down under? Must have been some serious horizontal hospitality.”

“The first step on your path is to take a moment to receive some gifts. The first set is for being among the more pleasant surviving human beings. Adminstrator forums are full of discussion of various persons who were impossible to work with. I got you something personally. Human custom dictates that gifts are better than cash.”

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Alec fades in a beautiful looking guitar, and a pile of drums. On further inspection, everything is made from the bones and hide of the monkeys, along with the wood he had me collect. Regular looking toms and snares, but wood and bone instead of plastic and metal. And the guitar is beautiful. The body is built from bones with wood contoured around them. The neck is one of the big ape arm bones.

I play a couple riffs on the guitar. It’s tuned perfectly. I tap the drums. They’re wonderful. And I tell Alec, “Dude, these rock. Thank you. I didn’t get you anything. Sorry man.”

“It was a surprise. Mutual surprise parties are not a traditional human custom.”

After a pause, he continues, “The second gift is for completing the trial. All survivors received this.”

A coin materializes in front of me, and I pick it up. 25 oranges.

"That’s a lot," I say.

"It's a pittance that will permit you to purchase what you need now, given that there are no purchases available in the first zone.

"Moving on, the third gift is the balance of how you’ve benefitted our learning, beyond what we gave you during the trial. As I said during the trial, your negotiation skills are atrocious.”

Another coin materializes before me. 60 oranges

I’m flabbergasted. And silent. I have 94 o-thaums.

“Beyond the third gift is a request. Would you spend the next twelve hours drumming? I have more tests to run. You’ll be paid full contribution points for your time, not the discounted version from mid-trial.”

That shakes me out of my reverie. “You’re asking the Snake whether he’s up for some drumming?” I take 3 minutes to arrange the bone drums around the rest of my kit, and we run tom-thaum tests until it gets dark.

Dr. Strangeleaf says that we’ve got a working model finally. When you build a rhythm, you’re setting up sound waves and with the waves creating a pattern, it builds thaumic suction. Something something, blood flow, rip currents. He still talks a lot. What was interesting is that if the sound waves are constant, it doesn’t actually provide variation, so there’s no thaumic motion. So you have to drum something with actual variation. But you can layer waves. If there’s mini-waves on, say, the quarter-second, and then those waves get faster and slower in a wave-like motion, too, it works better.

When he calms down from his theory, he gives me the TL;DR. Higher speeds are better, repeating rhythms with moderate variation are better, and more layers of waves are better. That’s the theory.

During the sound tests, Alec fronts me the sixteen and a half o-thaums, and I’m sitting on a hundred and ten. I upgrade again: speed twice more. I’m up to eight times speeds now, and when using good sonic-thaumic patterns, Alec measures me at two and change thaums per hour of recovery. On the other hand, my upgraded self consumes a thaum an hour rather than the thuam a day I started with. It takes eight hours of drumming now to keep up with eighteen hours of activity.

“Will I see you again, Alec?” I ask. Fuckin plant is my best friend now that my other three friends are probably dead.

“If you manage to make it past zone one, I’ll be there as you enter zone two. Not until then.”

“Any advice before I go?”

In the end, I spend most of my remaining o-thaums adding coaches. I upgrade Phuc to a level two coach for one orange. He also gets an upgrade to handle Running and Endurance training. I spend another on a level two moving-mediation coach that I call the Drummy Llama. Sergeant Pepper’s level two audiomancy coaching and mixing level two echolocation coaching into pepper costs me two more. A level 2 guitar coach and voice coach named Knopfler is actually helpful. But what makes me smile is Alec’s final suggestion. I get an Indian hand drum set that I’ve never played or even looked at before and a level two Indian drumming coach. Alec even helps me name him Bik after a famous Indian drummer.

As the clearing starts to shrink, I gather my stuff, bow to the plant, and act like I’m not tearing up.

“See you at zone two.”

Then I turn and walk towards my new world, wearing my new indian drum called a "khol" on a strap, and letting Bik guide my hands to learn the basic palm and finger-rhythms of Indian drumming.