What direction are they in? Where’s the sun? Sun sets in the west. How do the directions work again? North, then, NEWS. No, that’s just the directions list. What time is it? One? Sun’s mostly straight up. I don’t know which direction they’re in. Fuck! I hope this works.

I stop running for a second, bend over like I’m resting to breathe, and prepare to fire off a message to them. I build the projection sound-tunnel, and surround me with a no-sound-out wall. The message is short, recorded, and on repeat.

“You’re near slavers. There's nine slavers and forty slaves. Sleep magic and a shapechanger. Run away. South to Cerberus. Find Priyanka. Need help. Need air magic to save. Attack between noon and two. Go, please!”

I hope that works. I leave it on repeat, and do another lap, watching carefully to make sure no one goes over to my sound bubble. No one does. After 2 laps, I find the team headed in some direction that isn’t towards camp.

I don’t get any message from them, but they’re running away from us, in what I hope is the right direction. I hope they send help.

If everything goes right, then I’ve got a few real days to figure it out. The thirty miles to Cerberus is a full day’s travel for most. Then they have to find it. There and back and finding Priya will take a minimum of three days. That gives me eighteen, with the six-to-one chronomancy. If I’ve got more than that, I can use it, but I have to be ready in eighteen days, and every topside time after that.

I finish jogging, then joke around with the slavers, and make damn sure I know where Sharon is. Then I head down, confident she’s not spying on me. I’m pretty sure she’s done it before, but I've never done anything really wrong before, and now it’s important. First order of business: Drumming. It's not just because that’s always first, but because it’s important this time. Since the caverns are now basically my domain and the other slavers don't come down here any more, I have a lot of freedom. I have been playing twenty hours a day, with a four nested thaum-whorl. Mushrooms and air pressure are each contributing a factor of six to thaum improvement.

What no one but me knows is that I can add two layers of thaum-whorl, and I can increase the mushroom output as well. Mushrooms go up by a factor of 8:6, or four thirds. Adding two thaum whorls gives me an extra fifty percent each time, which makes 2.25 times as much thaum production. Multiplying it out, that gives me three times the thaum production, when I’m doing this the optimized fashion. What that does for me is to upgrade from two non-drumming hours per break period to fifteen.

I let the slaves know that I’m experimenting with faster thaum production for now, and that will give them more time off for a few weeks, if they fill their quota faster. It takes eight hours the first day, then seven each day after that for the folks to produce their thaums, and we’re producing 2.5 yellows each real day, but spending only seven hours per fake day doing the production. We could produce more than a yellow thaum per fake day if we focused, but there’s more important things to worry about.

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I still use two hours a day to do exercise and stretching. Can’t give up on the health after all I did to improve it with Beef. Also, I work each day on escrima forms, which I’ve been doing, but haven’t been talking about. I really like escrima, especially with the three-sticks form. It’s almost like drumming with all the stick motion. But since the real monsters came out, I’m not sure I might not be better served by using something pokey: Knives? Sword? Spear? Maybe a javelin would be good. When fighting humans, my sticks seem to be good good. Against monsters, though, the ability to cut seems to matter.

Whatever. Not today. Coach Phuc reminds me that escrima has both a knife form and a sword form. It even has some double-knife and knife-and-stick approaches. Also, Escrima is best art. The range of the sticks is nice but Guro Inosanto built some pretty impressive work both with other weapons and weaponless. Maybe I can learn knives after I’m out of here.

Once my daily seven hours of drumming and two hours of health are taken care of, I spend the other thirteen hours in my 22 hour day trying to audiomance my way into understanding the other two magics down here.

The penultimate magic I try to understand is aeromancy. Unfortunately, I can’t do much with it. The borders of the cavern are all inside the pressurized aeromancy domain, and I think I need to hit the pressure border with my rhythms in order to understand it well. The only times I have to even look for a good understanding of aeromancy are when I’m in the transition room, and Jerry is slowly changing the pressure. What I learn across six transitions with Jerry is that I can’t figure out aeromancy at all. Maybe if I had a lot more time I could, but six half-hour transitions gets me bupkis and I’m not sold on ever figuring that shit out.

The last one is chronomancy. Tim’s a bit sloppy, and we find that there’s an area of the cavern that isn’t being covered by his six-times field, and so I start playing sound waves through it. It takes me two weeks of wrestling with the sounds before I'm basically out of time and frustrated. I’m close. I recognize the problem. I don’t know how I recognize the pattern, but there’s a rhythmic pattern in the chronomancy. It’s one of those deja vu things. I know I’ve seen that pattern before, but where? I have no clue. If I had a year, maybe I’d see it. In two weeks, I’m just angry.

Frustrated with my aeromancy and chronomancy problems, I throw a couple days at a different problem, and come up with a solution that amazes me. It takes a lot of work, but I can turn metal into speakers. I was trying to figure out how I was going to tell the prisoners what was going on, so I could get their help when shit went down. Now I’ve got it.

I can build a sound tunnel to the metal door, amplify off the door using it like the vibrating plate of a microphone, and run a second sound tunnel from the first to the second door, and repeat. When I put the second amplifier in the room it will make the sound loud enough for the prisoners to hear. After a few tests, I’m able to make it work with the bars of some cells, and it works so long as no one is holding them, dampening the vibrations.

The last item on my list is to prep the slaves. Before my last trip topside, I let each of them know individually that there’s a rescue attempt being mounted. I don’t know if it’s coming today, or a different day, but there’s something going on soon. I also let them know that I’ll be able to inform them via broadcast from outside, even if the time barrier makes it weird. Then I demonstrate, unlock all of their cells, and tell them to do whatever they can for protection against explosive depressurization if I announce the rescue.

With everything I know how to prepare already set up, and break time ready, I grab the last set of thaums, and head up, hoping that today’s the day.