The day turned and he felt his mana pool fill. It was empty one minute, the next full. One minute he felt powerless, the next vibrant and afraid of nothing. He wondered if having so much of his self worth or just worth dependant on a single aspect of himself was healthy. But then again, did he have any choice? It’s not like he asked for mana, or Qi or even to be a dungeon, did he? Oh wait, he did. Hard to throw a pity party if you're being honest with yourself.

But, one thing he decided to do as soon as he was able was to start digging again. His mana siphon ability had grown when he’d added another floor. If he wanted more mana, he needed more floors.

He made the rest of the chests, the showers, and the sinks. And he was almost broke again. It was funny thinking of mana as currency, but what else was? He could create anything or would be able to in time. The only limitation on him was mana, well and skill.

Fortunately, he had enough mana to create the last items on his checklist. The total bill was expensive but doable. Especially doable when he saw the showerhead cost. Only nine mana apiece. He guessed because they were so small and made out of bronze, the number of runes on them didn’t kick the price up much. He was starting to get a feel for how to calculate the mana points of things he created. Amount of Materials, Type of Materials, and How Complicated the Design seemed to be the three main factors in the cost. He remembered his tech writing days and the cost pyramid he’d learned about: Time, Quality, and Cost. Something about his new pyramid felt kind of similar. Anyway, he spent 6857 mana points and he was done.

He thought about talking to Baxter then but decided that since it was 12:10 in the morning, he’d better not. Better to let sleeping dogs lie, he thought. Especially rhino-sized dogs. He still had about 1800 mana in his pool, not including his 500 safety net. So, he could create some stuff. If he wanted. What he wanted though was to go to sleep.

He missed sleeping. He may not need it anymore, but he liked turning off his brain and falling into unconsciousness. He missed that. Not the whole tired thing, but the retreat from the world, the dreams. Frankly, he wasn’t sure how long he’d last if he didn’t have the capability to shut down periodically.

“You hear me Bobs!” he shouted. “I need to sleep!” He hoped he didn’t wake up Baxter.

He waited for a second, but there was no answer. Not that he expected one. He thought about dungeon points then. He could go ask the Bobs for a sleeping ability. But what if they gave him something lame and charged him a ton of points for it? There had to be something better than sleeping he could ask for, didn’t there?

Once again, he put the dungeon points thing on hold. He was not going to spend the points until he had a good idea of what it was he wanted. Not just sleep, but how much, what happened during, like dreams, all the details worked out. The last time he only got the Dungeon Scout when he asked for something limited. And he got skills instead of abilities. He wasn’t going back until he was pretty sure he’d defined what he wanted and then had a couple of backups just in case. Points seemed hard to come by and they spent really fast. He wanted to be ready in case they said no. He wanted to be ready to say, “Well, in that case, I’d like Ability B or how about we change Ability A in this way. Can I afford it then?”

Unfortunately, it was going to be a long day. Although at the end of it, he’d get to see his mother, so that was good. Also, by the end of the day, he’d have over 5300 mana points to spend. He thought back to not that many days ago when he only had that many to spend the whole day. Heck, when he first started he’d had 310 mana points. It was amazing what you grew used to and then regarded as not enough.

‘It’s official,’ he thought. ‘I’m a mana junky.’

He wondered if he could siphon more but then thought that the Bobs wouldn’t like that. Even if he could figure it out. They had seemed pretty starchy about letting him siphon any. Like they were doing him a favor, well, technically he guessed that they were, but still. Starchy.

“Enough!” he finally said. “Figure out something you want and go after it! Now!” Once again, he hoped that he didn’t wake the dog. ‘Talking to yourself probably isn’t healthy,’ he thought. ‘Although, with my mind split ability, I could actually hold a conversation.’

He could dig, build or make more loot or monsters he thought. Those are my options right now. Monsters - always a safe bet. Plus it would be fun. He hadn’t had a chance to really mess with his monster’s patterns yet. But it didn’t seem right when he didn’t have anyone to fight them yet. Build - probably need to. I haven’t talked with Baxter yet, but I bet my mom has gathered up some strays. Loot - it’s fun and a good way to level, give me something to study. Dig - always a good idea. More floors equal more mana.

All seemed like they were good ideas. He needed to build some kitchen stuff. An oven, a grill, maybe some knives. On the monster front, heck even not making monsters, he could make plants. Plants that would sense people or things walking on them, plants that would expand his area of perception. Plants that would claim territory for him.

Right now, he could see the porch. Not good. He needed to expand his range of perception, his area. He needed another floor too. Probably many floors. Someplace to put those strays of his mothers. All the ideas needed doing. All need mana, needed time. He wanted to take a nap.

First off, he was tired of building stuff for people. He’d spent three whole days doing it and frankly, he was tapped out. He could look around his giant Hotel Max and see a bunch of things that he could do to make it better, to make their stay more pleasant. But there was no Michelin Guide, no Lonely Planet Guide to Dungeon Hostels that he was trying to improve his rating in. As a matter of fact, as time went on, he wasn’t sure that he wanted a bunch of people that he didn’t know and didn’t trust living inside of him. He was starting to actually second guess his making residences inside him.

‘What do I get out of this?’ he thought and once again resolved to have a conversation or several with his mom and family. His dad was a firm believer in hard work, but he also believed in getting paid for it. Maybe not in dollars, but some form of social currency.

His dad didn’t believe in charity so much as enlightened self-interest. If I help you now and you get past this problem, someday in the future you’ll probably help me or someone else back. And the world will be a better place. At least that was how his dad explained why he was getting up at six in the morning to help patch old Mrs. Miller’s roof. Right before he threw a glass of water on his head. Cold water, he remembered. It’s funny how many of my family’s interactions revolve around cold water, he thought.

Thinking about currency brought him back to mana, his currency. Everything came down to mana. Anything he could build or create cost mana.

He wondered if there was a way that he could collect mana from people? He didn’t notice if when Hildi was here that his mana increased, but maybe the stories were right. Maybe the presence of humans or other sapients in him created mana for him? He hadn’t noticed any difference since Baxter left. Or even an increase from the time he’d created the snakes.

He’d have to look closely at his mana. See if there was an unexplained rise when the people got here. Or maybe when the garden started, the plants would generate mana.

Another way he could see of increasing his mana supply was by creating a mana collection stone. A mana stone. Start with a crystal, add some runes designed to allow people to somehow push mana into it. If he was going to be a hotelier, why not charge like one. ‘We hope you enjoyed your stay, that will be 50 mana. Do you need a mana stone to pay or already have one? No, that’ll be 60 mana then.’ He could see the counter, the woman behind it, dressed in a blue blazer and skirt, white shirt, medium heels, maybe a strand of pearls.

He actually kind of liked that idea. Nobody would be useless. Even if they did nothing, they still could contribute. Also, he liked the idea of mana as currency. He was controlled by it just as much as they were. It was also something that everybody would want, everybody could use. Unlike gold or silver, which ultimately were just a bit of shiny metal. And if they weren’t rare, then their value was pretty suspect.

Plus he could use mana stones as mana batteries. No more losing 600 mana points because he got wrapped up in something at the wrong time. He could just toss the mana into a battery and use it when he needed it. And he was definitely going to use it sometime.

‘Enough,’ he thought. ‘What am I going to do today? Dig, build or make more loot or monsters?’

He decided to put the mana stone idea on hold for now. It was a good idea but a little bit hardcore. He wasn’t sure how his mom, Hildi or the other members of his family might think about it. He wanted their buy-in before he trotted out a new form of currency. Plus who knows about what the Bobs would do or think? He’d want to get a sign from them before he attempted to put it in place.

The kitchen stuff he still needed was a good idea, but he didn’t feel like it. He’d get to it later. After his mom came and provided some feedback. She was a good cook, Bernie was better. He wondered if Hildi could cook. His sisters weren’t bad in a Hamburger Helper kind of way. Before he died and became a dungeon he used to exist on ramen and take out Chinese, so he was not great at designing a kitchen. Other than his time as a line assembler at Red Lobster, he had nothing to say about kitchens. Better wait ‘til somebody with more expertise comes along to tell him what to build.

That left building monsters or floors. Monsters sounded like fun. He was starting to get this Frankenstein urge, but once again, he decided to go with the building floors. It should both increase his mana and give the strays his mom was sure to bring home with her a place to live.

He looked over the roof. It was a layer of sheet metal. Solid with a very slight angle to it to allow drainage. The northern edge had a little bit of a parapet on it to separate the roof from the fake saloon roof and teepee standing on it. Regardless, he wasn't going to be able to build another floor on top of that thin metal surface.

He left the metal roof intact, but straightened it out, removing the incline. He was a little surprised how easy it turned out to do this was. He removed the excess wall with ‘Clean Dungeon’ and then he merged the two pieces back together. Not even a skill, just a benefit of being a dungeon, he guessed.

Then he created a sheet of sandstone 10 cm thick across the whole surface of the roof. It only cost him 900 mana points. He was surprised, but it held. Then he looked at the Max’s level which he was going to have to call the ground floor and tried to figure out where he could put some pillars in to prevent the roof from becoming the floor.

It was only now when he realized how surprised he was that it held that he thought how much of a dumbass he was for trying that. If it had come collapsing down, he would have lost three day’s worth of work.

‘Think before you create! I should carve that on a wall,’ he thought. ‘Heck, maybe Einstein and Oppenheimer should have carved that on their study walls. Although,’ he thought ‘they had nothing to do with the apocalypse. So wherever they wound up, I hope that’s a load off their minds. Instant karma resolution.’

He figured that it was a combination of the new balsa walls support, despite them being made of balsa, and the uniformity of the stone he’d created. There were no faults, cracks, shears or any structural defects in the stone, so it was quite a bit stronger than a native stone would be. Plus it turned out that his white sandstone was primarily made out of quartz and really strong. But balsa didn’t handle compression well and he wasn’t sure how good a rock sandstone was to build with, so piering was probably necessary.

The only problem was where to do so and how? How many?

He looked over the plaza level and thought about it for a while. Not being a structural engineer, he wasn’t sure where to put them, or even how many to put in. He just didn’t want a big chunk of stone hanging unsupported over his mom and family’s heads. It’d be ironic, he thought if he invited his family to live inside his dungeon and then killed them by having a roof he made collapse on them.

He wasn’t sure if Oklahoma still had earthquakes. All the fracking and disposal wells should have quit, so probably not. Hard to run a drilling rig if motors don’t work and he wasn’t sure that the Bobs were that keen on the oil industry. After all, they killed plastics and cars. Although he didn’t know why they killed cars and plastics.

Besides, he hadn’t felt an earthquake in the two weeks since he'd incarnated as a dungeon. Given his senses and the fact that he was buried in the ground, he figured if one had happened, he would have felt it. So he didn’t need to worry much about them. He figured he needed to worry about supporting the weight. The balsa wood walls were probably just a wishful thought when it came to supporting the weight of the walls. 2,845,675 kilograms is a lot of weight to hold up. Those walls would turn to grease if he depended on them to hold up a heavy stone floor.

He decided that he’d start with six two-meter pillars in two rows. The first row had one in the center of the dining room. He’d need to move a fireplace to position it. Fortunately, fireplaces count as loot, so it was movable. Plus now he had an extra fireplace or pit to give away or use. It’d probably come in handy sometime in the future.

Another pillar went into the big swimming pool. That one would be fun. He decided he’d carve stairs around the outside of it and let the kids use it as a diving board. He’d stop the stairs at four meters though to keep it safer.

The third one he decided to disguise, replacing one of the big walls between the rooms where they were adjacent to each other. Instead of a circular pillar, he’d make it three-one cubic meter pillars side by side, all joined into one. Those rooms would just have a non-wooden wall section.

The second row would begin with a pillar in the big veggie-garden-to-be. Then another in the smaller veggie-garden and finally, one in the main entrance. He was thinking that he could do something with that one as well, make it a guard shack or something, but decided to just let it be a pillar. At least for now.

Before he began on that pillar/roof project he decided to create the staircases to the roof. He’d originally thought of putting in two but later decided to put in three of them. One back in the northeast corner, which was slightly smaller than the other two, only three meters in width. Another one in the northwest corner by the main door and the final one he put by the dining room, to allow people on the second floor easy access to meals when they were ready. The other good thing about the staircases is that they’d act as another pillar to support the second floor. He hoped.

The staircases didn’t cost that much, only 175 mana points. So he felt good about getting those done before the people got there. He wasn’t sure how much mana the pillars were going to cost. He did the dining room pillar and it cost 391 mana points.

Expensive, but it took a lot of 4th level material to make it so he wasn’t surprised. When he did the next pillar, the one that was going in the swimming pool, it cost him 880 mana.

At that point, red flags started going up. He could build the next pillar but it would use all his available mana. He’d be stuck waiting on his siphoning ability to replenish his pool. He’d made a promise to himself that he’d keep a mana reserve. He’d just reached it. Beyond reached it if he created the next pillar.

He stopped then. He decided he was pushing his limits and with all the people coming, he’d need to make a bunch of stuff, like blankets or something. He was done until later. Now that he knew he wasn’t going to get the pillars created, he decided to call it a day.

He went back to studying his Runescripting. He thought about everything that he’d learned but hadn’t yet had a chance to practice. He didn’t want to actually spend mana, but he thought it might be useful to practice carving the runes. He also thought it might be handy to have a place where he’d carved a rune. Someplace that he’d go to look at the runes and compare what he’d carved to what the rune actually was. His memory was almost perfect now, but almost when dealing with magical forces seemed about like playing with hand grenades. Something you don’t want to do unless you’re sure you’ve got it right. Well, actually, he guessed you never wanted to do it.

His idea made sense he thought. Why not select a hallway and carve all the runes that he knows and their translations in it? It would be his own personal dictionary. If he ever doubted himself he could look there and see what the rune looked like. Plus, if he used his dungeon cleaning ability to remove the stone, he should be able to do it without spending any mana.

He decided to use the first room on the right of his first floor. Then he thought about the organization of the runes he was about to carve into this wall. Was there a Dewey decimal system or a way to alphabetize them?

He finally decided that he’d put all the elemental runes on the north wall, so he quickly carved ‘Elemental’ on the top of the wall. He then decided he’d carve all the control runes on the south wall. So again he carved ‘Control’ on the south wall.

He was at Copper rank and still having trouble with something as basic as organizing the runes he knew. He was starting to feel very glad that he had taken on this task. It brought back his programming experiences. When he started a program he felt confident, then he started and it all fell to shit. It was only after he’d been stuck into it for a while that he’d start feeling like he was getting somewhere.

The same thing was happening here. He had all this knowledge but didn’t know how to use it, didn’t know how to organize it. It was a little like a Google search. You could get back what you asked for, but then you had to read it to find out if it applied. Some of the time it didn’t and then you needed to change your search terms and start over.

At least, he thought there were no ads masquerading as search results here!

So he put his fire runes, his waters runes, his air runes on the north wall. Then he started to put the control runes on the south wall. Increase Quantity, Decrease Quantity, Increase Quality, Decrease Quality, Shrink, Expand, Time Symbols, Quantity Symbols, all were runes that he placed on this wall

Then he hit the contain runes. Lines that controlled the runes contained within them’'a activation. He thought that they could be runes, but really not so much. They were the containers, the controllers, the naming conventions, the way that various bodies of runes were called on. So on the east wall, he put the basic symbols and containers that he’d been able to decipher. The three-line symbol. What the breaks in the lines appeared to mean. The start symbol. The rune bodies naming symbol. That’s what he decided to call a group of runes that seemed dedicated to a purpose, a rune body. Then there was the way that you invoked the name to activate that body of runes.

Then he figured out that not all the bodies had containers. Some seemed grouped by the depth carved or even their method of carving. Curlicues or carving styles or other what he’d perceived as random flourishes added to the standard rune form seemed to name that a group of runes was a rune body, something that existed to perform an action or even several actions.

Also, he’d discovered that the way in which they were carved also set what the element the rune would control best. Sparse carving with an intermittent amount of material removed seemed to control air, blocky carving, a little thicker than normal, worked best on earth.

And finally, there were runes that didn’t really fit in the elemental categories, the control category or even the container runes. Runes like Desire, Fertility, Dissolve, Sleep, Awaken, Growth, Regeneration, Rejuvenation. So he started putting those runes on the fourth wall, the west wall. He didn’t know what to call that wall, so he just left the heading blank.

He’d been at it for quite some time. The walls of the room were pretty much covered with runes and their descriptions. He’d figured out that if he concentrated on filling just the letter tracks he’d carved in the wall with bronze, it didn’t cost him any mana, but it also didn’t seem to give him any experience for ‘Create Materials’ either. He’d done that because he got bored. He was taking a break, reading some of what he’d carved earlier and just started doing it. Creating seemed to be the dungeon equivalent of playing with a fidget spinner. It looked cool though. Almost like a monument.

It was now about noonish or so.

Suddenly he heard Baxter bark. Loudly, but just once.

“Baxter,” he said. “Are you all right?”

The dog replied. “Grass Eaters!”

Jake didn’t know what to make about this. Was the dog cussing? Is that a dog curse word? Was this a description of what was going on? Was he being attacked by ‘Grass Eaters’?

He asked, “What do you mean by ‘Grass Eaters’ buddy?”

“Squirrels,” the dog replied. “Bother us. I fix.”

Jake figured out that any squirrel that bothered his dog pretty much was going to get what it deserved so he let the topic drop. Besides the dog didn’t seem frightened at all, just a little bit annoyed.

“Where are you?” he asked.

There was a pause then and the dog replied, “Hildi say turnpike.” He wasn’t sure if the dog had asked or just needed a moment to remember what Hildi had said but, in any case, they were close.

Jake thought about that for a minute. If they were on the turnpike that meant they were near. At the most, in another three or four hours they’d reach Max’s. He wondered how many strays his mom had picked up. The original numbers were twenty-two adults and about sixteen kids he thought. He’d tried to add more space for the strays he was sure his mom would somehow get.

“How many people are there now?” he asked.

“I ask,” said Baxter. Jake could almost hear Hildi’s voice, could almost reconnect with her but not quite. Her voice came across as a hum, like stadium noise. He could tell it was a person talking but not what they were saying.

“17 adults. 13 shocked. 52 kids. 10 elderly” the dog finally replied.

“Excuse me?” said Jake.

“Ok,” said Baxter. “What do?”

“No,” said Jake. “It's something you say when another person surprises you with something bad.”

“People bad?” asked Baxter.

“No buddy,” Jake said. “It’s just the number of them that’s kind of bad. I don’t have space for that many people to live in.”

“Oh,” said Baxter and then paused for a while. “What do?”

“I don’t know buddy,” Jake said. “I’ll have to think about this.”

Jake quit talking to the dog then. The first thing he did was look at his remaining mana. Which led to the happy discovery that he’d gone up a couple of levels. It turned out that his creating all the stone for the roof had increased his level by two. At least he thought so because his rank in Create Materials had shot up to Copper, Level 5.

Which meant that he could finally make glass. And a whole bunch of other stuff. Things like gold and silver and steel and a poisonous gas that was odorless but opaque. He wasn’t sure what that gas would be, his chemistry was a little rusty. But he figured anyone that walked into a dungeon hallway filled with a gas that they couldn’t see through was a walking Darwin award anyway. But he could make his red oak tables and benches now! And he could finally make his windows!

He threw the couple of points that he was able to assign to his intelligence and wisdom yet again. He needed the mana. ‘More mana! More mana! Can’t have too much mana!’ he thought. It wouldn’t impact his mana pool until tonight’s replenishment, but it would be nice to have it.

But now he still had a people problem. As in too many people expecting a home tonight. If he made the beds in the kid’s rooms bunk beds instead of Full-sized like they were now, he could handle the kids pretty easily. And if he made the single adult rooms hold more than one single adult all the adults would have a place to sleep as well. It would just need some moving around stuff and changing out the furnishings as well.

He wondered how long these people were planning on staying? Were they moving in? Did they have extended family that they were going to invite to live here as well? He had fourteen single rooms. If he put another full-sized bed in each, he could sleep 28 adults. But he had ten single adults from his original group that he had planned for plus seventeen other adults plus ten elderly folks to find space for.

That made thirty-seven he had to find bed space for. If they doubled up in the queen-sized bed, that would mean he had room for 42 adult folks. He hoped they were adult about it because he didn’t have the mana to blow on making Full beds for everybody. And he wasn’t sure if he was glad or not that he’d put in the ‘Queen Bed of Good Sleep’ in those rooms instead of ‘Queen Bed of Concupiscence’.

He was glad now that he’d stopped making pillars when he did now. He had some mana still left in the tank. He also figured that he wasn’t going to be able to make ‘Bunk Beds of Good Sleep’ either. It was going to be bronze beds with a mattress and no box springs either.

Plus, they weren’t going to get a laundry basket or a chest either. He wondered what to do with all the stuff he’d created like baskets and chests? Did he leave them in the room and let the people assigned there fight it out for them?

He decided that would be a bad idea. He’d stick them all in the main hallway by the window, well window holes. And, thinking about it, if he put shutters over the windows on the inside, the big piles of chests and mattresses and beds would help keep the things locked. It wouldn’t look great, but it would do for now. He felt his inner dungeon twitch about that. It didn’t like not looking good.

He went to his pattern space and started designing his bunk beds first. He made them out of bronze and they were about as basic as you could get. Four stout bronze poles on each corner, two-bed frames to hold the mattress with a bronze wire mesh making up the bottom of the frame. On one end of the bunk bed, he put 4 cm bronze rods separated by a 10 cm gap all the way to the top of the upper-frame to make a ladder. The corner poles stuck up above the upper-frame about 25 cm to give the kids something to grab onto when they were climbing up. He made a decorative finial on the top of the pole and carved a hole through it underneath the finial so the kids could easily use the posts to pull themselves into bed.

He started to build the first bunk bed and realized that he wasn’t going to be able to do this. He couldn’t exactly tell before he used the ability how many mana points it was going to cost. But he did get a feeling. For instance, when he’d made the showerheads, he had been surprised by the feeling of ease he had when he first created one, the large fire pits had stressed him like he was going to be lifting a huge boulder.

It was like that feeling you got just before you did something like lifting a barbell or a jug of milk. Your body or in this case, his mind or spirit or whatever, braced itself for what it was going to do. Whatever that part of him that doled out the mana was, it knew basically how much mana it was going to need even before he spent it. That feeling before he started making the bunk beds was enough that he realized it was going to take a lot of mana to make them.

‘Hell!’ he thought. ‘I’m back where I started from!’

He thought about it some more. He knew from his earlier creating spree that a ‘Full Bed of Good Sleep’ would cost him around thirty-one mana points. He wasn’t sure why the cost was so low, but he wasn’t going to question it. That meant he could create the fourteen adult beds for about 430 mana. Done.

And, if he went with the same route, he figured he could probably make the kids beds too. He had already created thirty-two full beds for the kids. On looking over the rooms, he figured out that he could actually fit thirteen full beds in each room. Maybe even fourteen if he shoved them together nice and tight. That meant that he had to make twenty full beds. Done. It only cost him slightly more than 600 mana points.

He had points left over. Points he could spend on things he wanted to create, but once again, he decided to be frugal with them. He would need them he was sure whenever everybody arrived. There was always something still to get done. A last-minute detail that he’d left off or just hadn’t thought of. He went back to carving runes in the walls, re-thinking what he’d learned and what he just thought he’d learned. Trying to get a handle on how to use this skill.

He roused out of his rune study by Baxter saying, “Bad men!”

‘That didn’t sound good’, Jake thought. ‘I wonder what’s going on.’

His hawk had been circling overhead. When he quit controlling a dungeon monster, it went into a default creature mode. Flying things kept flying. They went as high up as they could go and circled. Things on the ground settled down, hid and stopped moving. Both seemed to be automatic behaviors.

None of his monsters needed to eat. But they could and judging by the snakes, seemed to like doing so.

He also could, well, script behavior too. Give the creature instructions to carry out when he wasn’t paying attention. Like in the case of the hawk, he could have told it, ‘Continue to circle, notice humans entering a circle surrounding a half a kilometer’. He hadn’t experimented, but he assumed the scripts could become fairly complicated.

Although calling them scripts might be a stretch. It was more of a series of general instructions. Do this. Do that. No need or even an ability to say not to do. The creatures did. And they didn’t do anything without instructions.

Another good thing is that the creatures had a certain amount of what he was calling remembered behaviors. When he said ‘fight’ he didn’t have to tell the snake how to fight. He just had to tell it to fight. Or to fight only certain people

But he was stressed and not really worried about anything so he’d left the hawk to circle and hadn’t told it to keep watch for his folks. He started to view what the hawk was seeing and then directed it to fly over toward the turnpike and 9th street.

He saw his dad and mom and Sammy and Dato and Rex for the first time since last Christmas when he’d come home for the holidays. He also saw Hildi and Baxter. They were all at the end of a column of rickshaws and seemed to be facing off against some raggedy men carrying weapons. He dropped the hawk to about 600 feet and could hear the whole conversation.

‘So that’s Wade,’ he thought, looking down. ‘Stupid hat.’

He thought about what he could do and decided that there was not much he could do. His hawk was a scout only. He wasn’t sure what that meant but assumed that if it attacked without being attacked first, it would get zapped like his first snake in Max’s had been. Maybe even before it got in its attack.

So he just circled, listened and when the encounter ended, he decided to do better. He wasn’t sure how he could do that, but somehow he was going to do better.