As I came out of the woods, I guess I looked a little battered, a little wild and bloody, plus Mike was carrying a four meter monster-lizard on his shoulder, so I wasn’t surprised when the girls looked a little upset. All four of them. Well, five if you count Roxie, but she looked more interested than upset.

Tanya yelled, “Oh my god!”

Janet just yelled, “Monsoon!” and they both came running along with the little girls over toward where we were walking back toward the teepee.

“I’m alright,” I said. “We’re alright. We just ran into this fella” pointing at the lizard, “and he objected to our entering into his territory.”

“What in the hell’s name is that?” said Janet.

By this time my head had cleared up and I’d had a chance to look it over. “I think it’s a giant collared lizard. They call them Mountain Boomers. It’s our state lizard.” I stopped for a bit and then had to add, “they don’t usually get this big.’

For some reason, this struck everybody as funny and they all started laughing. I laughed with them, but the big monster was probably heavy, so I walked over to the first of the new trees just past the teepee and motioned to Mike to let it fall to the ground.

I looked down at it along with everyone else, and said, “Skin and butcher or bury or burn?”

About then little Baila walked us to the dead monster lizard, reached out her hand and placed it on the monster’s belly and said, “Loot.”

There was a pause and then the monster disappeared leaving behind two teeth, a hide, four lizard steaks (each about as big as a kilo rump roast) and 5 silver pieces.

We all stood there, looking at the loot, I guess you’d call it, and Baila. Back and forth. Stunned.

“Baila, Precioso!” her mom said. “What did you do?”

“I looted it,” she said. “It was a dead monster, so I looted it.”

We all stood there some more, no one really knowing what to say. Because in the pre-Event world, old-Earth, you just couldn’t loot things. Didn’t have monsters, so there was that. But still, looting was a thing. Now. Hmm.

Janet was the first one to speak after that. “Does that mean that we could have looted the giant rats and squirrels?” she asked. For some reason, everyone looked at me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so. I think it’s probably just monsters or beasts that you can loot. I hope so, anyhow.” I bent down and moved the loot around, picking up the skin, the meat, making sure there was nothing else in the pile. It was all relatively neatly arranged, with the meat and everything else being piled on the skin. The skin wasn’t tanned, but it was cleaned. “I guess you don’t get the core either.”

“Well that bites,” said Janet. “What level was this lizard?”

“It was level 7,” Mike said. I didn’t know and evidently dead things don’t have levels.

“That’s a copper core. 700 experience points,” she said. “I wonder if you can loot after you take out the core?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Thank you, Baila for showing us this was possible. How did you know?”

“In my games,” she said, “we have status screens and monsters and loot. Now we have status screens and monsters and I thought we should have loot too.”

‘What can I say, she’s right’, I thought. ‘If we’re living in a world of monsters and status screens, I guess loot makes as much sense as anything. But holy crap. Loot!’

I picked up the lizard steaks and added them to a box in my inventory. I looked around and everyone was watching me, so I thought I should explain myself. “Didn’t want the meat to go bad. I guess you guys can split the rest of this stuff. After all, you all killed it.”

“What happened?” asked Tanya. “You left for firewood and herbs and come back pretty much devoured.”

“Hang on,” I told her. “Let me say something.”

I looked at the group and said, “This situation just makes me cleared on what I’ve been thinking for a while, and that is ‘never be unprepared’. Big Mike, how much mana do you have?”

He looked at his status and said, “I’ve regen’ed about 10 mana, plus I got about 80 or so from leveling up.”

“Your leveling up kind of defeats my point,” I said, “but after the fight, if you didn’t level, you would be sitting right now on 10 mana points. Which is enough to cast about one Force Bolt. That’s not enough! We should always meditate after a fight. Who knows when the next one is coming. Got out of the woods, great! We’re in a safe location. But now, before we do anything else, we need to get our mana back. It’s like we’re guns with no bullets. Agreed?” Several, if not all of the heads nodded.

Big Mike said, “You know I do. After the giant rat, I was afraid, but after that lizard, I am really worried. It hit you hard and you never had a chance. If you hadn’t had so many health points, you’d be dead and then that monster would have started in on us. We’ve got to be ready. Mama, let’s meditate.” He paused for a second and then snorted. I sympathized. It hit me on a regular basis just how absurd our world had become.

And so we did. We dropped there in the shade of the tree and started to fill our mana pools. I finished in about 8 minutes, they finished in about 14 minutes. Evidently, meditation had an effect on both Stamina and health regeneration too because when I was done, I only had some light scars and my health was back to normal. As soon as they were done, we stood up and started talking again.

“Tanya, I’m sorry but that scared me and made it really important that we always are at peak condition. Everyone, tonight while we are practicing, I’d appreciate it if no one would go below 50% of their mana before they start to regen it. It’s just not safe.

“What happened?” she asked.

I looked at the Smiths and they nodded at me to tell it so I started the whole story. Being sure to emphasize how we were ready, the lizard just attacked at the exact wrong time and then there was nothing I could do. I was stunned at first from the lizard's attack and then I stunned myself with my cast that went bad. I made sure to point out that spell shock was a thing, that if you got hit or the spell was disrupted in mid-cast you were probably going to take damage and get stunned by it. That went over like a lead balloon. A bunch of mages all learning how vulnerable they are.

Big Mike was particularly not happy about that. I didn’t realize that he didn’t know that I’d tried to cast Force Bolt and been stunned. I wasn’t much happier myself. I wondered if a shield spell would prevent the damage and prevent the disruption. I hoped so, buffs were suddenly a lot more important than they used to be. I mentioned that thought too. And, once again, I mentioned how we were out-leveling our spells. We needed more options. Better damage. Better control. Better weapons. Better armor. We just needed to be better. The last part I kept to myself. After all, what’s the point of saying what everybody knows and can’t do anything about.