We head in as a team. My sonar does an awful good job of checking to see if anyone is nearby. Mu’s spyholes with his advanced vision give us a great capability to look far away as well. Danae is with us as a guard. She can’t see or hear any better than normal, but she can out-fight both of us put together, and between her combat prowess and Mu’s portals, we should be able to escape if someone were to find us.

We leave the horses in the distance, and move by foot this time. It’s a little easier to be stealthy without the extra five feet of horse-sitting, and we can jump through a portal faster without turning the horse. Sure, the other two could pick up some straightaway speed on a horse if we didn’t have portals, but we do. The horses are grazing far away with loose ropes keeping them in a place.

Twenty-five miles into the territory we think of as Mike’s we finally get eyes on someone. There’s a group of folks that seem to be patrolling, and they’re moving pretty fast.

There’s eight of them: six men and two women. One of them is doing something to improve their speed. They’re moving at about 10 miles per hour, which is a lot faster than the 3.5 mph walk-speed of a normal human. A second glance shows them jumping and bounding like beach balls. It takes 5 minutes of observation before Mu concludes that they’ve got to be operating under reduced gravity. We all agree. It seems that they’ve got a gravity-manipulator on the team. Watching closer for another few minutes, we observe that they are all pretty fit AND they’re occasionally eating thaum-coins to maintain their energy-consumption.

Along the way, they run into some wandering monsters, and by the looks of things, their patrol also has a responsibility forclearing critters as they go. A couple giant eagles are dispatched in seconds, as gravity returns to normal for the team, and stops being normal for the animals. Flight under increased gravity appears to be darn-near impossible, and despite being fifteen-foot wide dinosaurs, the eagles are not really optimized for ground-fighting. On the good-news side, it seems that whoever is in charge of heaviness doesn't have a lot of fine-grained control.

Later, when they encounter a pack of ten foot tall wolves, they face more of a challenge. Much like how our ancestors solved an analogous problem half a million years ago, though, ranged weaponry proves to be the solution.

There’s a guy throwing knives, a girl with a bow, and some modern David with an honest-to-God Goliath-killer sling; that long piece of leather used as a rock-throwing aid. As we watch, it certainly seems to be effective. I’d have trouble launching rocks at the speed his are moving at. A couple folks settle into defensive postures with shields. A couple more pull out spears.

It’s crazy to watch them prep for the fight, as I notice that no one is set up to use magic. Is this an all-physical no-magic party? A team like that must be pretty tough in a fight. On further observation, they are. Twenty wolves surround the patrol, which hunkers down defensively. The three ranged weaponeers whisper to one another and start targeting one specific wolf. The wolf dodges the first volley, but it can only dodge so long with three moderate expertise missilers shooting it. First it gets smacked hard in the face with a rock from the sling. That slows it just enough for an arrow to hit it’s leg, slowing it down further. Three seconds later, missile command switches targets while the wolf bleeds out.

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When they see one of their own go down, a half-dozen wolves charge in from several sides. Two get hit by the ranged-crew, and two more have to dodge spears, leaving only two to jump in and nip. But the shield-users are there, and despite a substantial weight advantage, the wolves bounce off the shields, and run back out. Three more exchanges like this, and we have seven damaged and/or dying wolves, and no injuries among the eight people. When the wolves try to retreat, Miss Gravity and the archers pick off another eight, while five wolves escape, and are not pursued.

After confirming that no one was hurt, and taking five to rest after combat, the patrol continues. Between portals, aerial eye-spy, echolocation, and sound-dampening, we manage to trail them for four hours without getting either tired or noticed. Eventually, their seeming patrol loop takes them back to a village.

Nestling into a grove of trees a mile from the village, we spy on them until dark, and then continue into the night. Danae isn’t happy, but she understands the necessity of what we’re doing. I’m starting to get antsy as well, not having done any drumming in several hours.

The place reminds me a lot of Imaginetown. I think they have an earthshaper rather than a woodshaper. There are large earthwork walls around the city, to prevent monster invasion probably. There's about thirty individual-sized huts, and two big structures in the middle of town. They’re longhouses or whatever those things are called. Maybe they’re barracks? Maybe prisons?

In the wee hours of the morning, we get out of Dodge. An hour of portal-based travel gets us back to the horses, and we discover they haven’t been gobbled up by any crazy mutant attack turkeys. Twelve hours of drumeditation, weapons practice, exercise, and more thaum recovery, and we head back for more spying near dusk.

It takes us three days to learn enough to build a breakout plan. I eventually dropped a sound-bubble over a corner of the building, then we drilled a hole through the roof using Mu’s portal. Then we dropped a port-hole to spy on the insides.

The buildings aren’t alarmed. There are no apparent guards. The buildings are separated by gender. There’s a lot fewer women in the barracks than there are men. Part of that is probably because most of the huts are actually double occupancy, and as expected, the doubles are over 90% male-female pairs.

Activity all but stops a little after dark. No one’s using a light source. They have a fire-witch somewhere in the group that keeps the fire unreasonably high and hot. There are a couple lookouts at night, but that’s about it. There's way less security than I’d expected.

We plan the rescue for the next night.