That night, I let folks near my hut know that I was going to be drumming more loudly than normal. I let my sound barrier extend out a bit, and build a thaum-condensation field rhythm off some Sepultura tracks. It only hits a couple of the town huts. Because of where I’m situated, on the edge of the town, near Zeke and Flynn, they’re the only two impacted by the drumming. I’d brought it up with them, and they both said they could meditate through the noise.
It seems like most of the townsfolk spend a lot of their time meditating. They work for a day, and then meditate more or less until they’ve recovered their thaums. One eighteen hour day of being active usually results in about 26 hours of recovery time, but they’ve tweaked it into two day chunks. They’re “awake” roughly nineteen hours--nineteen and a quarter--out of 48.
Flynn had been up the day before, so he went in to meditate expecting that he’d be down through to next morning. However, he was full up on thaums by dawn. Needless to say, he looked a bit surprised when he rolled out of his hut in the morning. He didn’t know it was me, and I didn’t tell him, but he has to be a bit suspicious. Zeke woke up about normal, but he’d already had basically a whole 24 hours of meditation, so he probably didn’t notice the couple hours saved.
That day Chaim, Jace, and Gemma head out hunting, and allow me to come. Gemma is a girl-next-door cute ginger, if the girl next door was a model and a porn-star. There’s an old 2000s era movie about that. The chick was blonde, though, and the best tune in the movie was Under Pressure. That's not a bad tune for drums. Jace is a kind-of asian looking Aussie who won’t shut up about how handsome he is.
This group is quiet, for normal people, when they move. Gemma carries a blowgun, and specializes in breath control which she uses to blow clouds of poison at folks. Jace has a dagger, and uses the word “atonimancy”, while implying that it’s about his opponents being dazzled by his good looks.
The group uses Chaim’s light-bending powers to sneak up to fairly close to a giant water buffalo. It spooks a bit as it hears something nearby, but then I add sound-walls into the mix, and it relaxes. Jace jumps in, and makes half a dozen quick cuts on the monster-bull before escaping. Between Gemma pushing the smells away with her frankly amazing lung capacity, Chaim managing visual illusions, and my handling of the sound, the buffalo can’t find us at all. Five minutes later, it collapses, and Jace calmly cuts the blood-supply in its neck. While a critter that size has quite a blood supply, it runs out fairly quickly.
Apparently antonimancy means something like affliction-magic. He weakens things over time. It’s a very powerful mix with Gemma who can use poisons to do similar things. If something can’t kill them fast, it dies slowly. And almost nothing ever even finds them with Chaim providing light-magic illusions.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
On the way back to town, I talk a bit with Gemma, and don’t even drool once.
“That’s very impressive breath control. Why’d you choose it?”
“Anapnomancy sounded good to me partly because almost nothing is prepared for poison in the air. The big monkey came into my camp, and chased me around the hut for five minutes, then collapsed. The little ones lasted only a few seconds. Maybe more interesting than that, I can control my absorption of poisons too. But probably best of all, how do we get thaums back?”
“Deep breathing while meditating or sleeping, I think.”
“Bingo. And I can take breaths that are at least five times as large as anyone else. So I regenerate thaums five times faster. Everyone else in camp is meditating for almost thirty hours out of each two days. I only need six hours. Why’d you choose audiomancy?”
It seems I’m not the only person with thaum-regeneration skills
“Dude. I’m a drummer. My plan is to be the best drummer this dimension has ever heard. And without synthesizers, I gotta use sound magic”
She giggles, and we trek back towards home.
Once we get back, I manage to ask Zeke if he'd noticed anything weird last night.
"I woke up a little early." Zeke doesn't talk much.
"How were your thaums?"
"More full than normal."
"I think my drumming makes a difference to thaum regeneration."
"Let's try it again tonight before saying anything. I'll watch more closely."
I play near his hut again that night.
On the next morning, he pops up after six hours of rest, thoroughly recovered. Shortly thereafter, he calls a town meeting, and points out that I’m able to help folks recover thaums quicker. As a round number, that lets everyone who can be nearby stay awake twice as much as they used to. Well, everyone except for Gemma. She can now recover her daily thaum expenditure in under an hour, but that only helps her. While I can cut her rest time by a lot, resting eight hours less every two days is a lot less impressive than saving twenty hours.
I let the crew know that I don’t much like hunting and fighting. It’s quickly agreed, though not without discussion, that everyone will give me ten percent of their hunting take, on an honor system. I don’t have to hunt, but I’m allowed to. And Zeke goes about re-arranging the village so that I have a sound-friendly hut in the middle, and that my thaum field can reach everyone. Finally, the world is right, and I get to drum from about 7pm to about 7am every day.
It’s like being a rock star again. People are paying me to drum. It’s money for nothing. I start the night with Dire Straits. I go mostly with a Pick Withers kinda beat. There were a lot of choices. Dire Straits had five different drummers at different points. Williams may have been their most famous, but I like Withers best for his more jazzy feel. Hakim and Porcaro were great, but mostly for other bands. I do the Williams intro to MTV, then play Withers for the rest.