I’m running. I run towards the sunset. That’s easy enough when it’s afternoon, but in the morning I have to keep checking where the sun is. Eventually, I notice that the sun is opposite my shadow, and I just have to run towards my shadow. That's a pretty cool trick for directions.

I’m trying to drum while I run. Turns out if you strap the drum carefully to the lower back--which I did with Tay’s help--then it doesn’t bounce much, and I can play it with my tail as I go. I’m my own marching percussion section while jogging.

I'm timing my jog at a smooth 1:12 per mile. I can keep that up for a long time with all the endurance training. The environment has changed a lot since last time I went on a long run. Wide open spaces, in particular, have gotten more dangerous since I was here last. The hardest thing is to watch out for airborne predators. It wouldn’t be that bad, but a lot of them are dive-predators like rabbit-hunting falcons. They drop out of the sky moving as fast as a couple hundred miles an hour, and it’s near impossible to evade them. They can fly as fast as I can run, even at a dead sprint, and they can turn faster in the air than I can on the ground.

But the air monsters’ weakness has so far been stable. A moment of disorientation from ramming a 130 decibel sound wall is pretty rough if you’re heading towards the ground at 150 mph. Even as a gryphon, that smarts a bit if the thaums I’ve picked up off gryphon pancakes are any indication. I’m too small for the rocs to worry about, it seems, which is quite the relief.

The ground creatures I run into, I just run past, or mostly, around. Giant spiders are nowhere near as fun as they were back when Tay was around. At least they’re not fast, and I can sear their nearly invisible webs. Harder ambush predators are ones that dig holes. I watched a rhinoceros get captured by a giant antlion or something. Do I remember right that antlions are vibration-sensitive ambush predators? I really need to upgrade my hearing to vibration-sensitivity. Or add a second sense. But it’s really the same thing. Just different bones and different amounts of vibration. Anyhow. Antlions are scary. Sand sharks too. I’ve been avoiding sandy soil ever since that rhino got eaten. Partly because stuff lives under it, and partly because it slows down my movement enough that I couldn't get away as fast if I found something.

Also, I’m avoiding water. The little piranhas that I met a year and a half ago are nowhere near what’s dangerous in water now. I’m not just staying away from deep water, but the shallows also. I can’t sear well into the water and the creatures are nasty. Crocodiles are only the beginnings of the problems. I've seen tentacles grabbing low flying birds. My college bio prof used to say that whatever you see on land, the stuff in the water is bigger, meaner, and more dangerous. I’m taking his words to heart, and staying the hell away from the water. Land is quite scary enough for now.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

It’s kinda weird and kinda scary running here. I decide to lay off the running, and do more walking and more drumming as I’m heading through rolling, grassy hills. I need to be able to sear better, and the more response time I have, the better. The speed of sound is about twelve miles per minute. When I jog at one mile a minute, I’m losing almost ten percent of my response time for things moving towards me.

Also, I need to be rested. I’m kinda like a rabbit wandering around looking for friends. I can’t actually hurt any of these monsters, I bet, except for disorienting the flying ones. Haven’t seen anything in the last three months that's as easy to kill as the sasquatch from back when I was chillin’ with Alec. I barely survived that, and although I’m a bit stronger than I was then thanks to Beef, it ain’t much.

The way the more mathy Imaginetownies--Imagineers? Or was that copyrighted by Disney?--talked about this world’s “system”, they somehow decided to mark a healthy young human male average at anything as about fifteen “points”. Then, because of how you could buy advances from Alec, every point above or below that would count as a variation on strength or speed by about 25%. The geeks were excited about that being a cube root or something, with every three points doubling.

When Beef tested me before training as being able to bench 100 pounds, they counted my strength as about a twelve. Training for the year got me up to an average fifteen, benching 200. I’m stronger, for sure, but that’s not much against these creatures. The sasquatch I fought in the tutorial would lose to pretty much anything here, and it had a strength closer to twenty-five.

So, basically, I’m in the ecological niche of a rabbit. When a rabbit is attacked, he doesn’t turn around and fight back against the predator. What he does, is run. And my hawk is working like rabbit ears. The thing is, I’m not really interested in the stage name “Rabbit.” It’s taken anyhow. I like the rabbit song though.

So I head west. Half the time, I’m jogging, and the other half walking. The running back-drum is good training for drumming while I’m tired, and for drumming while doing something else, but it’s not good drumming. It's hard to maintain a beat when I'm bouncing as I run. I keep it up anyhow. Maybe I can get good at it, and it doesn’t slow me down that much. When I get to rivers, I cross them if I can jump and I can see the bottom. No tentacle grabs for me. If not, I run upstream looking for a place I can jump, which I eventually find..

Drumming keeps my thaums up enough that I can pull fifty reds out of my ear every other hour, before my drum session. That’s only half an orange per day, but I had a couple years as a starving musician, and I guess the habits stuck. I keep up with the frugality of collecting the change.

I spend six days in motion. It’s been two years now, and I'm almost used to not needing to sleep. It’s still weird. I’ve run West for about two days and crossed five rivers. I had to run upstream to narrow jumps on two of those. That’s where the other four days went. What directions were the upstreams on those rivers? Yeah. That’s not my core expertise. I know I’ve gone West for a couple thousand miles, plus or minus whatever running up or down the rivers did.

On the seventh day, I see smoke again off in the distance.