Turns out there’s about 20 people who live in the town. They live together mostly for self defense, hunting together, and companionship. It’s mostly hippie commune stuff, so I fit right in. I mean, it’s a whole lot easier when there’s no resources to manage, and all folks have to do is hunt or sleep. This one might work, unlike the other ones I tried in the late 2040s. Magic to do some of the remaining hard work helps too. Hell, I’ve got twenty-odd hours a day to drum, and there’s no real demands besides no fighting each other for real.

I arrive in town, and within an hour, Zeke the tree mage builds me a house by growing a few trees together. I offer to share my shower, and folks love it. It seems like there’s already a team in town that can manage a shower. Unfortunately for the townsfolk, the team appears to be Ray, a short, depressed water-mage, and Tanya, a six foot six amazon fire knight who goes around wearing full metal armor. Some rumor mill grinding tells me they did work together on showers a few times. However, Ray’d rather be cooking, even with his water specialty and martial arts background. Tanya, on the other hand, would rather eat and hunt. She likes to eat. Guess you have to eat a lot at that size and muscle density. Well, you used to have to, and you get into the habit. And she can grill things up pretty quick.

It takes a few days to get used to how things work around here. Most folks do something to help out the town, and everyone does some hunting as well. Usually, the hunts are in groups of two or three, which provides enough thaums to live on for those folks who aren’t lucky enough to have tom-thaum-magic.

I go out on hunting patrol with almost everyone across the course of a few weeks. Usually groups of three, with me as a fifth wheel--fourth wheel--but occasionally I’m just the third guy. We talk, we’re between cordial and friendly, and I’m occasionally able to help. Almost everyone there seems to be at the five upgrades level, but they’re almost all better fighters than I am. I guess that’s pretty likely when it comes to survival. Even with six months and a couple hundred hours of escrima practice done near-optimally with the head coach, I still don't have years or decades of practice like some. Mary, and this dude Flynn have been martial-artsing since they were knee high to fuckin' ants.

The first group I go out with is Al, Gwynnyth, and Angela. Al apparently played football instead of wrestling like he looks like he should. He uses his geomancy primarily for defense. We find a six-foot-tall porcupine with an attitude, about 200 times the mass of a normal foot-tall spikey skunk rat. As much as an old world porcupine can’t shoot its quills, that didn’t stop this one. Most of the spikes were blown away by Angela. She’s a short, androgynous-looking youngster who’s bald. Maybe she’s fifteen, and unlike every single one of the other women in town, she doesn’t seem to have done any body modification to make herself hotter. Maybe they were all tens, before coming to the new world, but now they’re all elevens. It’s possible. Professor “G for Genetics” always said that assortative mating makes all positive traits positively correlated, and they survived. Possible or not, runways and red carpets never had this level of beauty.

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Two of the forty spikes in the first volley get past the seventy mile an hour winds that Angela produces, and promptly hit an earthen embankment. Is it an embankment or a rampart? Earthen embankment sounds better, so I’ll go with it. Al is pretty fast with his earth shield, and he seems to mostly use it as defense. Against easier creatures, he’d wrap his hand in rock, and then just punch a thing. But for some reason, he doesn’t want to walk up and punch the porcupine.

That means that Gwynnyth gets to handle it. Gwynnyth is a long thin Asian Aussie. Asian by look, aussie by voice. She is tall and thin enough that in the states she would’ve been a model, but she says she didn't like that job and ended up as a consultant-type down under. She’s probably got the scariest magic of anyone. She throws balls of what she calls void, and they seem to just disintegrate the stuff they touch. Her balls aren’t super fast, but their destructive power is unparalleled. They have a hard time going through lots of stuff, so Al is mostly good at defending against her in spars, but against a porcupine whose defense is to hunker down and point spines at us? One moment the porcupine has a head, and the next, it doesn’t. Void ball for the win. That chick is scary. Her nickname, when not talking to her, is the devourer. That’s the only interesting critter we hunted that day. Tanya makes a mean grilled porcupine, and I teach the townsfolk Tom’s trick of not extracting the thaums before eating.

A different day, I go out with Tanya, Zeke, and Ray. Zeke is the defender for the day: he’s put most of his upgrades into toughness and is specialized in defense. At one point, Zeke demonstrates that I can’t hurt him physically at all. I take the hardest swing I’ve got with a baseball bat, and the bat breaks over his still arm. Then the broken end bounces off his skull. He doesn’t appear to even notice. Zeke’s got arbormancy: control over trees, and is pretty darn good with his axe. But his best feature is his ungodly toughness.

We go up against some sort of giant lizard: forty feet long with big teeth. It charges us and bites Zeke. He's relatively uninjured, and he grabs its face and some trees bend down to help him hold it. Tanya would normally avoid setting the whole forest on fire, but Ray’s with us so Tanya walks up and flamethrowers both the dino-beast and Zeke. Eventually, the lizard starts smelling like a cooked, well, lizard. Then Ray gets the river to come visit us from half a mile away. When I ask, he shows me that he can also build a water-bubble for defense, and even summon quite a lot of water from thin, or at least wet air. But apparently that takes more thaums than it’s worth if we’re just putting out fires. The trees recover quickly between Zeke and Ray. Zeke looked like he was in the fire, but to see him, there’s no real indication of that. He’s seriously tough, and that kind of ruggedly ugly that is almost handsome but not quite.

After a relatively short hunt again, we head back to town. There's some social fun, but then I get back to my houselet, and drum the night away. I lead with Whitesnake: Still of the Night. More and more, with coaching on vocals, I'm singing to accompany my drumming. No guitar is a bit of a limiter on getting the full effect from the songs, but I'm getting better at using the Marimba for piano simulation. Double mallet technique with the tail is crazy. It might be easier to double mallet with my hands, and let the fast tail handle the drumset. Whatever. Whitesnake until dawn.