My first month out of the tutorial is a lot easier than the month I spent in it. First thing first: there are no monkeys trying to kill me on a weekly schedule. It’s kinda a relief. I’m pretty much done with killing things. I don’t like it when they try to kill me, but since I don’t need food, I'm not going out hunting. And my super speed is good for running away.

Second thing, my frond friend isn’t around. I miss the green bastard. We spent a month together. And the sumbitch up and left on me. This is also relevant because in the month, I haven’t found a way to buy anything.

Apart from that, I’ve become something of a wanderer. I walk through the endless forest, playing my drums. Day and night, it doesn’t matter. I walk and I play. Sometimes it’s the marching toms. Sometimes it’s the khol. Sometimes I find a clearing and set up the drumset.

The first few days of drumming were tricky. I was playing, or, well, learning to play the khol. The way you use your fingers and your thumb and different parts of the drumhead for such different sounds is way cool. The two sides of the drum are tuned an octave apart. This particular khol is tuned to middle C, which coach Bik calls "Sa" and the other side is higher.

Turns out there’s a lot of creatures in the jungle. There's more variety than I saw when I was with Alec. Some of them like the option to run away when they hear my drum. Others of them object violently to my noise. A wild bacon tried to stab and eat me. But I move so fast now that I was gone before it figured out I’d left. I promise if I was going to fight something, it’d have been the bacon. I miss bacon. Same thing happened to a few jungle dog-things, a bear and a cougar. I'm like Brave Sir Robin, but faster.

Turns out that ambush predators make a lot more noise than they think, if you hear well enough, and Frodo’s always on now. So I’ve got 30 yards around me where nothing moves without my knowing. And the dark simply means I get less color in my vision. I’ve taken to walking around eyes-closed half the time.

Another trick I’ve developed is to build a one-way sound barrier around me. I was building walls of sound that could reflect or absorb. Turns out that the sides of my wall don’t have to be symmetrical. I can have the outside of the wall allow sound in, but have the inside absorb sound. That means that I can walk through the jungle and make all the noise I want, and nothing except for what’s under my feet notices. I don’t use it too much though, because there were two problems with the sound bubble approach.

The first problem, I’ve fixed. Turns out the sound bubble that absorbs outgoing sound also absorbs my echolocation. My ultrasonic Frodo-beeps are an awful lot of what I’ve been using to sear the world for a while now. So a 10 foot bubble mostly limited what I could see to stuff inside the bubble. I almost tripped over a badger. That was not so good. On the other hand, audiomancy has improved a lot along the way. Not only can I make those partially permeable sound bubbles, I can make bubbles permeable to some frequencies but not others. So after three weeks, I didn’t have that particular problem any more.

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The other problem with sound bubbles is bigger. When I sound-bubble, I stop the thaumic attraction whirlpool of good drumming, and my thaum generation rate drops like a rock. Sure, I’ve learned about moving meditation, and I can manage three eighths of a thaum per hour of regeneration by just "drummeditation". Unfortunately, my thaum spend rate is about a thaum every hour, so just meditation clearly isn’t enough. I think someone wants me to have to kill stuff to stay alive. There's no way that eating nuts would be good enough.

On the positive side, I can build a helluva thaumic whorl when I’m drumming now. If I play the nested waves pattern, I can manage three nested waves, at my current 8x normal human speed plus a tail. That basically means that thaums are diving into my general viscinity, and pretty darn easy to absorb. With active meditation working, and my best thaum-generation drumbeat, I generate somewhere upwards of a hundred r-thaums a day. It's enough that hunting piggies for their thaums just ain’t worth it.

I do still practice escrima every day. Just an hour or two. If I get into a scrap, I want to be able to defend myself, if I can’t just run away. But I don’t see myself doing a lot of fighting in the future. I’m a drummer, not a fighter. And the beasts are somewhat less murderous than the attack monkeys were.

As usual, I'm walking around, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this tree stump before. Maybe as many as five or six times before. Hmph. I wonder if Alec would’ve sold me a sense of direction. And I wonder where the rest of the people are. Maybe I should pick a direction and see if I can keep going that way. But how will I know which direction I’m going? How will I know if there’s people nearby? Oh. Right. The sky. I can use the sky for directions.

As usual, the solution to finding people is probably audiomancy. I wonder if I can rebrand as Sonic the Snake-Bat-Monkey. I don’t have spikes, so I can’t do the hedgehog thing. Does my mohawk count? Kinda looks like the drawings. But not blue. Definitely not blue. And not gonna be blue.

But I’ve got rocket-speed. When I’ve counted it off in a clearing, not official or anything, I did a 1.1 second 40 yard dash. Old world record was like four and a half seconds. So, it’s not like I was fast without a boost, but with eight times speed, I can play fast on TV.

And I do the sound control thing. That’s gotta count for something in the naming thing. Ok, probably can’t call myself Sonic, even though Nintendo-Disney’s lawyers aren’t much of a threat any more.

Oh, right. Audiomancy. I spend most of the next couple days working with Sarge on volume control for noises near me--and then on selective volume control. Then I head out with my khol, following the path of the sun, at a brisk walk. Despite what coach P's new endurance focus would like, I’m not a marathoner yet. Anyway, that shit cuts into my drumming time. Still, I’m covering 25 miles an hour walking and drumming as I go. A little less in the forest, I guess, so I can go around things. My sound bubble amplifies all sound going away from me to Rock Concert volumes. That has a great side effect that even the predators don’t want anything to do with something as loud as me.

Two days, and a thousand miles later, I finally meet another person.