The thing about making plans is that they mostly don’t work. I mean, making the plans work. The difficulty is actually following them. Plans are fine if you’re doing something easy. But you know what they say about trying to guess the future: “Prediction is hard, especially about the future.” And when there’s a bunch of other folks trying to make your plan fail, then you fail an awful lot, and starting from a plan is silly. You start with observation, and looking for things that might make a difference for success.

I keep my eyes and ears peeled for another month of real time, half a year of subjective time, and three things happen over the course of the month.

First, the conspirators begin to appreciate that things are moving a lot faster. Two successive months where the take is closer to eighty yellow thaums than to four makes a big difference there. That means they like me a lot more.

Second, I start getting a feel for the vibrations of some other magic. I don’t have it nailed yet, but there’s a vibration going on with some of the other thaumaturgy I've seen. I end up exploring seven different magics across the course of my six subjective months, to see if I can understand them. The first one I got a look at was mushroom magic. Mushrooms are pretty cool to me, because they have a resonant frequency. Well, that’s not really true, but it’s close enough for government work. The substance that mushrooms make themselves from, it vibrates. It’s not like plants, not quite as rigid. Maybe I remember my biology professor saying something about a different kind of cell wall in fungi than in plants, but I might be wrong. Whatever. What I can tell you is that I found a frequency that makes the mushroom vibrate. That makes it release more spores, more thaums into the air. I can up the mushroom contribution from six times to eight times normal. I don’t use this immediately, but it’s good to know that I can make the fun guy dance.

The vibrational capacity of the mushrooms only took a couple weeks drumming to figure out, once I started listening to vibrational frequencies of things. Next on the list is the pillars. Three different kinds of pillars, and their vibrational supports are about as expected. The four-by-four looking supports have basically no vibrational frequency whatsoever. Thick wood just doesn’t vibrate at the ceiling support length of eight feet. The stone pillars also basically just eat sound, or reflect it. Depends on the porousness of the stone, and it varies a lot between pillars. Some is concrete-style highly porous rock, while other bits are marble-like, with its tremendously reflective surface.

It’s not that I don’t spend a couple weeks trying to make the pillars vibrate, but after a couple weeks on each, I still get nothing. I move on. The metal supports are great, but the best I can do is get some humming resonance going with them. They’re too short for the resonance to break anything though. While I can get a very deep hum to go along with the rest of my drumming if I get the frequency right, I've got nothing beyond that. The metal bars of the cells are about the same, but shorter and irregular, so the frequencies to resonate with are weird. The crossbars don't help. The dirt is dirt, and I can get bits of it shaking with loud enough music, but that’s all. Well, that’s not really all. Like Piyu told me, I can levitate some pieces of dirt, but that’s because the air pressure of the sound wave against the super-light pieces of dirt / dust is as strong as gravity, when I set up a standing wave. Sound levitation rocks, but it’s not useful for much that's bigger than dust.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

After testing against the materials, I have to use my charm to do the next set of tests. Phil is apparently the metallomancer, and he’s friendly enough. When I see him, I ask him to move some of the posts for me. My request comes with half a yellow thaum, and I also play the music he likes when he’s visiting. So he spends a couple hours down in the pit with us, moving metal pillars, getting half-annoyed because I keep changing my mind, but staying because he’s getting paid. At the end of his visit, I’ve determined that neither my audiomancy nor my magic ‘hawk can detect anything from his practice of metallomancy.

Two more tests, two more failures, and two more yellow thaums gone. Svetlana turns out to be the xylomancer, and a guy I hadn’t met before named Roger is the geomancer. He does both the rock and the dirt, but he’s better with dirt. I can’t tell a damn thing about what’s going on with either Svetalana or Roger when they’re magicking, and I had to pay Phil to get Roger to visit. It takes me a subjective month and a half to get all three of them to visit.

There is good news, though, on the people-front. Charlie agrees, with adequate bribery and some bogus excuses, to knock some of the prisoners out for me. He knows I know what his powers are, so it's no extra secret lost, but he doesn't know how closely I'm listening. When he knocks out the first person, I sear something. Once he's managed to knock out ten people, I can tell that there’s a strange vibration occuring, very quickly, right as they’re being put to sleep. When Chuck leaves, I also pay all the prisoners who got knocked out as well, just because I said I would. Far more important than that, I think I know a lot more about what’s going on. Charles is putting folks to sleep very quickly. But in doing so, he’s basically doing the same job as a binaural beat. He’s super-relaxing folks. I think I can duplicate it.

Guess what? I can do the same thing with music, I think. Two months pass in an instant. I think I even forgot to go outside on one of my breaks, as I work my ass off to try to get my drums to produce a binaural relaxation rhythm. On the sixty-third day and the 1727th try, I summon all my concentration, build two sound-tunnels to Prisoner Jeff's two ears and start playing. It takes twelve seconds, but he falls asleep. It's easy to tell because he’s snoring. Five more days of work, and I can put someone who is angry and running towards me to sleep, and I'm only a bit poorer. I don’t have much spare attention for anything else, but this is incredible.

There’s more magic to observe, but it's been a real month, and my topside visits are also proving fruitful. By the middle of this second month with the slavers, everyone knows my routine. I come out of the cave, complain about the bright sun, stretch a little bit, and then run for an hour. Since they’ve already seen my speed a few times around when they captured me, I don’t hold back, and I spend most of an hour running about 250 loops around their area. It's about a third of a mile around. I’m still fast, and still working to get faster.

What they don’t know about my runs is that they’re more or less on autopilot now. I do the run, and try to make sure I look like I’m trying, but most people just can’t understand a guy who can run close to eighty miles an hour over a long distance. I mean, that’s a good running time, but if I weren’t at 8x speed, that’s only about ten and a half miles per hour, or a bit under a six minute mile. Since most folks can't math, they just see me doing crazy fast runs.

While I’m running, I’m actually spending most of my time on audiomancy scans. I have increased my skills, and now have about a three mile range. Roughly every step of the way, I’m throwing my listening location to various spots a few miles away from the current one.

On the twenty-ninth day of the month, I hear a group of three nearby--about three miles out--and it’s not the slavers.