Days blend into weeks and weeks into months. I asked if anyone was up for music every day for the first week or two. Every other day for a week or two after that. And now it’s been three months, and I still don’t have anyone to play with.

Chaim left on another walkabout. Then he came back. He brought back Beef too. Beef’s real name is Alan, and he’s a muscle-mancer. He’s got a pure strength focus, with just enough toughness to not pulverize his body when he hits things. And then he decided to focus his magic on his muscles. It’s like some sort of crude drug he pumps in, and then he gets all swole beyond his normal levels. It didn’t take long for Beef to make friends with Victor, who managed to build him a weight set. Beef is squatting sets of five tons of iron on a helluva reinforced bar. And then he muscle magics and doubles up, and triples. I’m pretty sure he can squat a school bus. Beef is wider, heavier, and stronger even than Al, who by the way, is named Alika.

I’m now sure that all the ladies did a bunch of appearance adjustment. Three months of outsidering, and you see things. It’s like with guys: if a guy is a big strong muscular guy through his teens, he always kinda knows he’s a big guy. On the other hand, the runts or weaklings who sprout or bulk up at eighteen or twenty-two and become all buff and stuff, those guys always seem to not quite be comfortable being their size. It’s worse when a toothpick like me starts lifting or doing martial arts at forty or fifty. There’s always this compensation because they didn’t grow up thinking that being big or tough was natural. All the ladies are doing that with their looks: the whole I'm not really like this thing. It took a couple months, but I’m sure now.

I also got to know Lee and Dan who’ve been here the whole time, but I didn’t do anything with them in the first couple weeks. I probably didn’t meet Lee for the first month. He’s a bit of an introvert, and doesn’t like people much. Also, he’s a lightning mage. Oddly, the lightning isn’t white like normal lightning, but rather golden. Also, he used to do HEMA--Historical European Martial Arts--so he fights with a sword, like Victor.

Dan is the most normal person in town. Normal height. Normal physique. Fairly stable distribution of improvements so he’s, well, normal. His magic, though, is very different. He’s a teleporter. He’s friendly enough, and we’ve talked about it. He started only being able to teleport thirty yards. He’s up to half a mile now. And he’s darn near instant. One time we played tag, and it was actually fun between my rocket-speed and his whole Nightcrawler thing. It takes him a moment to teleport, and then he has to find me, and I'm both fast and silent

As to speed, I’ve gotten faster. It's not magically faster, just running practice faster. I’m down to under eleven seconds for eight-hundred yards. Without my speed boost, that would put me at just about the world record speed, according to coach B, for 65 year olds. I’m also doing pretty well on mid-range runs. I can run eight miles in six minutes, and I finally did a marathon, updated for my speed. Two hundred miles in 2:57:13. I’m faster than normal freeway driving.

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Also, I asked Chaim, who’s been exploring a lot, and Angela, who flies, about how big the world is. Chaim wasn’t sure: he doesn’t travel fast enough, but Anglea says that this world is a lot bigger than the old one. I guess it kinda makes sense. I’ve personally traveled several thousand miles this past several months, and didn’t find oceans or even big lakes. My total travel is maybe about the same as the width of the United States. If I’d been going straight, I coulda gone coast-to-coast. Run, Forest, Run.

My question turns into a debate in town, and words like Eratosthenes and equator keep coming up. Eventually Mary pipes up.

“Didn’t any one of you losers take Trig? We can measure tangents to the globe on the sunset, if someone has a good stopwatch. “

“Stopwatches didn’t transfer over, nerd!” I think that was Gwynnyth.

“I can measure time perfectly, down to hundredths of a second,” I tell her quietly.

“Great. Then it’s easy. Find a place you can see the sunset. Lay on the ground, and watch. When last part of the sun crosses the horizon, mark the time, and stand up. Mark the time the top crosses the horizon again. Then you take the ratio of the day fraction to ...”

“Is that English still?” I ask.

“Gaahhh! After one of you mouth breathing idiots takes the measurement, then you bring me the numbers.”

Next day, I do her trick, and it’s 4.21 seconds from last light laying to last light standing.

She measures my height in shoes as six-three and a quarter. Then she gets a piece of bark from Zeke, a charcoal stick from Tanya, and starts mathing.

Five minutes later, she comes back and says, “Yep, this world is a lot bigger. Radius is a lot closer to twenty-five thousand miles, rather than four thousand. That means the surface area of this world is about forty times bigger than Earth.

"Also, the world is forty times bigger, and the population is down by a factor of about twenty-five, then population density’s down by a factor of a thousand. Half a billion people living on about two billion square miles of surface. Depending, of course on how much ocean there is. Even if this place is three quarters ocean, we’re still looking at no more than one person per square mile. That’s if they survived the last nine months.

"At least mass or gravity is different enough that we’re not squished. If this were earth-rules, we’d weigh more than six times as much on a planet this size, what with a two-hundred-odd times the volume and a radius-squared of only forty-ish. Unless it's hollow. Could this be a hollow world, and gravity works the same-ish?

What hits me is that I’m not really any relatively faster than I used to be, compared to the size of the world. I run eight times faster, but the world is no longer twenty-five thousand miles around, but rather a hundred and fifty thou. I guess it's also kinda normal that I only met a couple people on my trek. That's a whole lot of space for people.