Apparently the folks in the new world are a little less friendly than the folks from the old world. And so are the fucking fish.

I’m laying on the side of a streambank, using my tail to rub healing gel on my burned skin. Can’t do anything about the inch of mohawk I lost, but it only took me twenty minutes to get back to normal functionality on echolocation. And Alec promised that it’d grow back. I wonder if the gel will grow back my hair?

And the fish are evil too. Damn fish took a couple nips out of my already hurt hands, so they're burned and bleeding. There’s fucking piranhas in the stream. Or maybe it's just something that just acts like piranhas. In a firm demonstration that the hot mess I left behind taught me absolutely nothing, I decide to fuck up the fish who bit me on my already burnt skin.

An hour with a monkeytooth spear, and I get nowhere. It turns out that spear fishing is a lot harder than what it looks like on the Discovery channel. Even my speed isn’t quite enough to get me to stab fish accurately. I remember something about refraction screwing up aim, but it isn’t helping me.

If they were nicer fish, I could probably grab them before they bit me, but these ones turn and bite, so that’s out. My leather clothes weren’t scarred by the heat. Maybe they’d protect me okay in the water. Nah. I'm not trying it, and I don’t have good gloves. Note: I need good gloves.

Sitting on the side of the riverbank thinking and drumming, I notice that I’m on the same side that the fire bitch would come from if she were following me. Turns out gravity mostly works the same, even if momentum doesn’t. I’m able to jump the 20 foot river after testing with a couple practice jumps. It's not even very hard. I guess folks can usually jump a little taller than they are from a standing jump, and there was big news back in ‘52 about someone breaking the long jump world record and finally crossing thirty feet.

Going five or six times as fast as that dude, I can run across the river in a step, without even worrying about falling in. Anyhow, I’ve got fish to fuck up. They bit me.

Sarge says that dolphins are known to kill fish by first stunning them with sound blasts. And some bugs, pistol shrimp maybe, do something similar. So, I sit by the river with a pair of escrima sticks, cracking them together in the water and trying to find the sound waves they produce. I learned to find soundwaves in the first place using my echolocation. I guess I'm still a bit reliant. It’s extra tricky because I can’t put my head or my hands into the water for hearing or clicking. Damned bitey fish.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Forty-eight hours later, I’m pretty sure that Hell-Queen Persephone isn’t coming this direction … I mean, I did circle around a bit on my path running away, and even spent a couple miles running over rock to make sure that she couldn’t follow my footsteps. This lets me focus more on the river, and a little less on my surroundings, except for my twice daily thaum recovery sessions.

Nine days into my water-sonic testing, a puma sneaks up on me, and would’ve torn out my backbone if it weren’t for the monkey-jacket. Puma’s bigger than normal, fast and strong, but I’m a lot faster. Stuns on it’s skull, a couple steps back, and a spear to the throat ends the evil kitty pretty fast.

I promise to pay more attention to my surroundings, and then go back to sonic water tests … and drumming to recover thaums. I almost die a couple more times while not paying attention. My monkey skin jacket saves me again from a twelve-foot python-looking rattlesnake that looks to be hunting for dogs instead of mice. My jacket gets cut by its sharp teeth, but it doesn’t get pierced all the way through. Once I knew it was there, and got a distance from it, it wasn't dangerous at all. It doesn't move fast enough to bother me, and eventually slithered off under a hail of rocks. An ostrich-sized eagle was my most dangerous visitor, but I was able to out-loud the thing with sound magnification, and it eventually flew off without lunch.

After my three near-death experiences, I finally figure that I should get Frodo to remind me every fifteen minutes, and go back and forth between loud enough to keep monsters away and underwater sound manipulation.

It ends up taking an auspicious forty-two days to build underwater sound bombs, mostly because I couldn’t sear the sound in the water. Twelve hours after the sound bomb is working, there’s no bitey fish left in the stream. I bet Tom’d like them for lunch. I’d take them to him if I thought I could find him again, but it’s several hundred miles away, and even though I’m fast, getting lost is pretty easy if you’re directionally impaired like me. I could get to somewhere near him by midnight, but then not find him until next month.

Now that the bitey fish are gone, I try to sear inside the water. Takes me three hours to figure out that I’m not a dolphin. Can’t hear in the water. Not only can I not hear with my hawk, I can’t hear with my ears well either, and water in the ears sucks. I'm gonna have to work on that.

At least I can manage some underwater sound-magic. And drums sound cool underwater, even if it’s way too cold in the stream. I take a couple more days to finish up my sound-in-the-sea training, and then I’m back to exploring. But now, a little quieter. I can dodge animals that want to eat me, and I definitely don’t want to run into another demon-chick.