My foggy brain starts to wake up. I roll out of bed, throwing my legs over and reaching for my sticks. Ow! I’m not on a bed. I’m on a hard dirt floor, and my head hurts.

I open my eyes to look around before remembering that I don’t have to. I start to ping with my searing, and the world comes into focus with both eyes and my hawk. I’m underground. I think I’m in a jail cell. Rock most of the way around me, and then metal bars in front of me. A big metal door with a big keyhole. It's the classic jail cell from movies about the old days. That is, it's mostly a cave, with some bars.

I start trying to figure out more about this place I’m in. I can get a picture of my cell, which is about ten feet square-ish, and then past the cell doors, there's an open cavern that’s maybe fifty feet in diameter and vaguely round. There are two passages leading off from the cavern, but my pings don't give me a lot of information about what’s down those corridors. They seem to be dirt and stone too, from how the echoes work, but that's about all I can find out.

I sit for a bit in my cell. Then I check my pockets to see if my drums are still there. Yes. They are. On review, so is everything else. I wonder if you can go through someone else’s magic pockets. Why don’t I know this already? Fuck it. I pull out my stool. I’m gonna be pissed if someone takees my stool, but I want somewhere to sit.

I sit around waiting for someone to notice I'm up. I bang a bit on the bars, make some loud noises. After six minutes, twelve and a half seconds, I’m done sitting. I’m done waiting. What can I do? I can drum. I love these pockets. I pull one of my taiko drums out, and a threesome of taiko sticks, and get on with the drumming thing. I wonder how many drums I need to do Chonlima well?

I’ll try it with one first. Tap tap tap tap tap. There's too many different sounds in the piece. I'll add one more drum. Five drums and fifteen hours later, I’m happy with my result. I’m still alone. There’s still no people. Shoudn't someone have visited by now?

I figure I should at least check the door. Yep. The door is actually closed and locked. The bars on the cell are spaced too close together for me to slip through.

I wonder if I can sear remotely? I can build sound tunnels to send sound, and sound tunnels to receive. Can I build sound tunnels and then use echolocation on the bounce-back responses? It looks like I’ve got nothing but time. It's worth trying.

I set up a sending sound tunnel to the mouth of the passage off to my right, and then a receiving sound tunnel to the same place. I start pinging. This is weird. I’m getting responses, but they’re not so clear. My sound tunnel isn’t straight enough to get a good picture, and the sound waves coming back are too bouncy along the sound channel. It's like getting all the sound but no good direction information. The tunnel away from me curves after twenty or thirty feet, but that’s all I can tell really. My conclusion: searing isn't going to work so well in curvy caves.

I still don’t know what to do. Can I up the thaumic density in the cave? I’ve only got 3 sticks out and 5 of my taiko drums. I’ll try it with these. I settle into a thaumic suction rhythm, and start playing. With only three limbs playing, it’s hard to get the full 6-layered thing going, so I stick with four nested waves. Wait, I can do kicks too. Nah. I think that might hurt the drum.

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I stop for a bit because I’m too full on thaums. I grab twenty out of my ear--about what I can normally manage to recover in an hour--and drop them in my pockets. Then I start playing again. It takes me almost two hours to get up to full. The time just slips away while I’m drumming.

What did I learn? It seems like the thaums are harder to collect around here. But it may be temporary. Alec used to make us do experiments more than once. Do it again. Twenty thaums takes two hours to recover a second time. Seems like I can replicate the findings. Why? Okay … I pull out another twenty from my ear, and start drumming again. This time, I put most of my attention into trying to see the sonic patterns in the air. It takes another few hours to reach the clear conclusion that I can't see the thaumic patterns. I need to set up my thaumic sensors, and I need to set them up around the cavern to see what’s going on. My door’s still locked, though, and my tests seem unlikely to happen.

What about breaking things? Can I vibrate the door and break it? Or one of the bars on the cell? If one of the bars came off, I’d probably be able to get through.

It’s not too hard to find the harmonic frequency of one of the bars. Whack it with a stick and listen to the sound. Then duplicate the sound with my record and replay audiomancy, and then reinforce it, making it louder. I try for a couple hours before concluding that I’m not getting out of the cell that way. The metal is ringing like a very fat guitar string, and it seems just about as likely to break.

On the other hand, that fat guitar string looks like it’ll make for some good sound. It’s not quite a cymbal, but I bet I can play some stuff and use it as a cymbal. Wait, there’s more.

With the cross-bars on the cells being where they are, there’s multiple lengths of bar, which means multiple frequencies. The door too, I can use that.

It takes about ten minutes to re-organize the drums. Now I’m facing away from the bars, and I can drum with my hands. Cymbals is the wrong way to think about the bars, they're more like a xylophone that I can play with my tail. It’s a little like a xylophone, anyhow. There’s only five different lengths, and they’re not terribly well in tune with one another. Maybe it’s more like a set of very muffled bells.

I spend another four and a half hours playing with my new instrument. It’s hard to use, but it works if I only treat it like a bell in my tunes. There's still no one around. You'd think that someone who threw me in a cell would come visit sometime.

I wonder how hard the dirt is. I pull out the monkey tooth knife, and start digging in the dirt. Maybe I’m going to have to do that thing. What was the prison movie that my uncle made me watch with him? The soundtrack had The Marriage of Figaro, and the characters end up as old men in Mexico at the end. Maybe I need to dig a tunnel with my knife. The monkey tooth is pretty tough. Ten minutes of digging in the floor, and the dirt gives way to stone. This might take a while. Digging isn't really my thing. I get back up, and start checking how fast I can spin the drumsticks on my hands. It's an important skill for a drummer.

A few minutes later, I hear a door open, clanging like metal doors do in the movies, and echoing down the stone passageway I was trying to get a picture of. Checking the echoes, I can guess it's probably a hundred feet down the curvy passage.

I put my drums away, not wanting anyone to steal them. Then I listen as footsteps come my way.