Still running and walking by halves each hour, I head down the stream for a bit. Eight hours and three hundred miles later, I think I’m still walking downhill. I mean, the water’s flowing this way. That means downhill, right? Along the way, I’m wondering if I should be thinking about upgrading my toughness. South Asian drumming is kinda hard on the hands. If this were a guitar, my hands would be bleeding by now. As it is they’re just sore, or maybe bruised. Can you get a bruised thumb? Can I upgrade just the toughness of my hands?

I’m walking along playing my khol, and thinking about sitting and playing tabla. The arm position for that is different. And I’m feeling like my tail isn’t getting enough use now. I need to spend more time sitting and drumming. It’s been, what, a couple months since I left Tom’s place? I mean, how long did I spend at the stream? Was it really fifty days of trying to get sound-water magic? Since I left, I haven’t gotten anywhere near enough time on my kit. I wonder if I can put myself out in the middle of a field, and just play there for a bit?

This world has a lot of variance. I’ve seen rolling hills with mostly grass. I’ve seen rocky hills too. I guess I’ve seen mountains too, but I didn’t go up them. They seemed tall. There’s lots of forest. I’ve seen warm, wet jungle type forests, and cooler evergreen ones. I haven’t seen an ocean. I haven’t even seen a big lake. Or a big river I couldn’t jump across. To be fair, jumping at my speed is pretty far. I can pretty easily clear a hundred feet with a running jump. So it takes a real river to not be able to jump across. I mean, I’d have been able to jump parts of the Mississippi river up by LaCrosse.

That said, Carl Lewis was pretty close to able to jump the headwaters of the Mississippi 100 years ago. It’s not that wide. Maybe six or seven yards at the mouth of the river up at Itasca. I’ve been there, but back then I couldn’t jump it. Fifteen feet is a long running jump for most folks. Especially kids.

I’ve also not seen snow. I shoulda asked Alec about snow or weather in general. Gosh, have I even seen rain? Can’t remember.

Okay. Running through the night isn’t hard for snake-bat-monkey-man, but it’s getting dark, and I’m tired. It seems like prairie off to the side of the river, and so long as there’s no man-eating, eight-foot prairie dogs, I should be in good shape.

I set up my kit for the night, pull thirty reds from behind my ear, and get to drumming. I feel like I’m up against a limit in my ability to understand sound … I can’t see it well enough with my current level of audiomancy and echolocation. I’m really gonna have to up my perception next time I see Alec.

Today it’s just fun drumming while I mess around with magic. I start with the Ramones. Blitzkrieg Bop is fun drumming. It’s also almost as good as We Will Rock You as a song for voice and drums. I Wanna Be Sedated is good practice for my voice. Then I play the rest of their corpus. Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden is next. I miss the heavier guitar there, but I can hear it in my head. Soundgarden gets me to the end of the night.

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Along the way, I have managed seven seconds of sound capture, and I’m working on editing that captured sound. Currently all I’ve got is speed variation. It has all the benefits and costs of old-world speedups. If I play back five percent faster, that pushes the pitch up by five percent. If I get good at this, I’ll be able to play nightcore by myself.

Sgt. Pepper lets me know that it’s almost necessary to work with sound recordings because otherwise we end up waiting for the next section as a first section gets heard too quickly. I kinda wish we could speed up the sound of a live performance, but when I think about it, I’m not really sure how that would work.

In the morning, I get back to my walk and drum thing, mixed with endurance practice. Coach Phuc says that I have to work sprints for endurance. Apparently in the 2030s the debate between lower intensity and high intensity workouts was settled for good. Short bursts of high intensity exercise are better for damn near everything. And if you want endurance, you do lots of short bursts. Walking is still good for you, but for everything else, intensity trumps duration. Even the marathoners were finally training with sprints. Whatever. If it means I’ll be more prepared for the next fire vamp I meet, I'm in. And it means I walk 45 minutes each hour, so more drum time.

I spend a couple more nights with Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains then Alice Cooper and Motley Crue, and cover a thousand miles during the days. I wonder how big this world is. How many things are different? Is it possible we have a flat earth finally? Could you fall off the edge?

Sometime midday, I’m looking at my growing river that I’d have a hard time jumping across. It’s forty yards maybe, and much more than thirty yards is a stretch for my jump. As I look for a moment, the reflection off the river shows smoke rising into the sky from the forest a couple miles off.

Not wanting a repeat of the mess with my last flame, I cut the drumming, and hurry over to near the forest. Getting a bit of a picture of where the smoke is coming from, a mile or two into the forest, I jog around the forest for a bit. It’s less than an hour of jogging to the downstream side of where the forest meets the river. Given that I jog at sixty, and it looks like the river runs through the middle, that means the circle-ish forest shape is about 120 miles around. So divide by pi--about three--gives me diameter of forty miles, more or less.

I run back around the outside, back to almost where I was, and I see something of a path cut into the forest, not far from where I started. A little bit of exploration discovers that fifty yards in, along the path, there’s a huge, 20 foot sign, made from wood, and painted in red letters.

“ImagineTown,” it says in giant letters, taller than me. And then below that there’s a bunch of symbols and drawings. A peace symbol, a dove, a Spock salute, some sort of tree branch, and a meditating buddha in a flower.

They seem like music fans. It’s mid-afternoon now, and no one’s likely to be asleep. I think through the obvious song to indicate that I'm friendly. The drum part is pretty easy on this one. I can add a bit of reverb to the voice with my sonic-mancy while amplifying it. I can play most of the piano part on a marimba. It seems like it's a go.

I back out of the forest, set up a part of a drum kit, grab my guitar, and practice for 15 minutes with a soundwall. Then I turn up the volume to rock concert volumes, and start playing Imagine by John Lennon. It takes 20 minutes for the townsfolk to arrive.