While George had spent the morning working on the swords, Priya had worked on communication. She’d made two posterboards to tape to the sides of the Tagon, right below the windows. On each, she’d written a concise set of messages:

Monsters can go in homes!

Aliens MAKE all fight soon

(kids/old too)

144 pts. = 2nd ability

It was bare-bones to the point of inaccuracy, but it should be legible from people’s windows. She’d also written up a few notes for me to hand out to anyone I met on the road. They were similar to what I’d written before, with a few additions:

Homes only safe for a few more days

Trial event likely in a few weeks, everyone must fight to survive

(may be able to go as groups, unclear)

Killing monsters gives points, 144 for new ability

Similar abilities improve each other

Spreading out ability use lets you use more times

Leaf-rodents incapacitated by capsaicin in eyes or mouth

Your friends, 105 Lavender Lane, 186 Russet Road

I’d actually spotted two people outside today. The first was a man at the opposite end of Russet Road, near the entrance of the neighborhood. He was accompanied by what looked like eight dogs. They couldn’t possibly all have been his, and I wondered if he’d been going around and rescuing accidentally-abandoned pets.

I hadn’t even thought about pets until this moment - I’d been so focused on my kids - but I knew a lot of people who worked all day still had animals at home. Did that guy have a plan to feed them all? Were there pet abilities? The questions distracted me, but I shook them off. He was moving in our direction, yes, but we needed to head the opposite way to get back home. We couldn’t afford to wait around to meet him.

The other person I’d seen was actually on our route home, almost back to the intersection with our street. We were heading toward them, but they didn’t stay outside long enough for us to reach them. They caught the sun as they moved, shiny and reflective from head to toe, as if they’d made or found real armor somehow. The way they’d fought had been weird. If they were holding any weapons, they weren’t large ones, but I was pretty sure they’d killed five monsters in five minutes before heading back inside. I tried to make note of which house they’d gone into.

For now, I wanted to get home, but if we went back out later, that was a person I wanted to talk to.

Seeing two people out during our brief journey home made me hope that there were more people already fighting in our neighborhood than I’d feared.

I was very pleased with my new sword. The reach wasn’t as good as my spear had been, but the agile little jerks couldn’t really get inside my reach anymore. Even if a leafenrat was right on top of me, I could swing it into their rear or side, or stab it into their back. Before, I’d had to resort to kicking them away when they got that close.

I’d told Micah my theory about careful ability use, and gave him permission to use a small amount of Conjured Flame or Freeze on every second monster, as long as he didn’t start to feel tired. He was pretty gleeful about this, and started yelling out “magic words” with each cast. He experimented with different targets: claws, legs, eyes, back, tail. I expected burning or freezing an eye would be best, but hitting a foreleg with fire was actually surprisingly effective. It didn’t make the leafenrats unable to walk, but their weird-leaf fur gave off a ton of smelly smoke that seemed to bother them and obscure their vision. They actually reacted more to the smoke than to damage to their eyes, for some reason.

We made it home without Gavin having to use either his old or new abilities, much to his disappointment.

I sent Micah to take care of the freezers, while I pulled the seat off a toilet. The Turners had shown me a reasonably good solution there: put the toilet seat on top of a strong trash can, keep the setup in a closed room, and throw the garbage bag outside once you got too terrified of it. There were obvious downsides to this plan, and I wasn’t sure what our yard would look or smell like in a few months, but this was one issue I was happy to kick down the road for Future Meghan. After all, that jerk Past Meghan had made me deal with the clogged toilet, so I’d just be keeping up with tradition, really.

I don’t want to talk about the process of dealing with the toilet. I took care of it. It was awful. I wasted a few gallons of water. Enough said.

Micah had stumbled out of the garage while I was occupied, looking exhausted. “Our inside freezer was warmer than the Turners’, Mom. The air in the walls of the chest freezer was pretty warm too, and the freezer was… really big.”

“You’re a hero. Go take a rest for now.”

I’d been thinking about trying to visit some of the neighbors’ houses - make sure they didn’t have needy pets, raid their cupboards, talk to anyone who was actually home. But that would have to wait until Micah was up to it.

For the first time since this had all hit I found myself without any urgent demands on my time. There were things I wanted to do soon, like try to board up the windows, but we should still have another few days. It was only… I blinked. Day 3? Yeah.

I pulled out some activity books for Gavin and Cassie, the fun ones where the included marker revealed hidden secrets on the page. I’d been saving them for the next time we made a big car trip north, but that seemed kind of irrelevant now. They’d been sad to leave their friends; let them enjoy themselves.

I grabbed a pillow and laid down on the floor next to them, then pulled up my interface. It had been a while since I’d done more than glance at it.

Meghan Moretti

Novelty: 17

Abilities:

Draw Attention (140%)

Assisted Strike (140%)

Points: 387

Money: 31

Blueprints:

Defensive Door (10 money)

Small Light Source (20 money)

Room Cooler (20 money)

There was a lot to think about. I was disappointed that I still didn’t have another ability available. I wanted a chance to look through the options again now, armed with my new information.

I waited for a lull in the conversation Cassie was having with Pointy - mostly just Cassie narrating her drawings and Pointy making interested noises - to interrupt.

“Hey Pointy… How are the kids doing, points-wise?”

“Micah has 300 points. Gavin, 278. Cassie, 73.”

The boys were both doing very well. And honestly, I couldn’t be too disappointed about Cassie’s points. They weren’t high, but she was earning them. If we could keep up what we were doing, she’d get another ability. Hmmm… Maybe there was something like a damage aura? That would make it a lot easier for her to earn future points, but I didn’t see how it would have any synergy with Pointy.

Was that a problem?

Part of me wanted to say no, but I knew that was just me being contrary. If Pointy got access to more information, or even just more processing power, it would benefit all of us.

I made a mental note to discuss the issue with the turtle later, when Cassie was sleeping. If we talked about abilities now and my daughter heard of something she liked, there was a good chance she’d just take it as soon as she had a chance. She might apologize later, but her self-control was probably about average for a three-year-old. In other words: awful.

“It seems like my novelty went up a lot.”

“Yes. Most of the increase came as you worked on the… Tagon… and used it in action. You were at eight before you built it, and at 16 before you left the Turners.”

Hmm… So, fighting my way back over here wasn’t worth too much. I supposed I hadn’t really done anything new on my trip home, other than fight with my new sword. I was guessing my “novelty” was a measure of how interesting I was for the bloodthirsty audience from the stars, but if it did anything for me I hadn’t seen it yet.

“What are the kids at?”

“Micah is at eight novelty. Gavin, six. Cassie, two.”

“What about blueprints? Did the kids get anything interesting?”

“Cassie has not received any. Micah has the snare blueprint he mentioned to you previously, as well as a duplicate of your light source blueprint. Gavin has a blueprint to make a ‘cooker’ at the cost of 50 money.”

I made a face. All the money I’d earned personally was enough to purchase half a stove. Whoooaaaa. Epic loot.

Not.

“These blueprints we keep getting. They seem really… useless. Am I missing something?”

“Useless? A light source could be of significant utility to extend the working day. If you had several, they could hinder attackers that would otherwise make use of the cover of darkness. And your species biology does not allow you to eat much of your available food unless you first cook it.”

I rolled my eyes at Pointy’s patronizing tone. “I don’t mean literally useless. I just mean… what I’ve seen so far seem to mostly be versions of things we could hypothetically make ourselves. They might be better versions, but they just don’t seem that good. Not ‘risk-your-life-for-this’ good. I don’t want to disrupt your translation work again, but I was just wondering if you’d seen anything obvious the last group bought that seemed a little more… awe-inspiring?”

“I don’t know what you think I have footage of, but I can tell you it’s mostly the dramatic parts - fighting, dying, difficult choices, stupid decisions. Not shopping,” she said. “Or at least not that I can tell without effective translation.”

“So… you’ve got nothing? Wait, let me ask a different way: is there anything you saw on this other planet that you don’t think Earth technology could have replicated?”

I was guessing that what they’d done to Earth was kind of standard. Take away wiring and combustibles, and 99% of our more advanced technology was useless. That forced us to risk our lives directly and was probably more entertaining.

It occurred to me suddenly that the Commonwealth’s decision to hamstring our technology had done more than just “level the playing field,” as they put it. I mean, it had probably done that fairly well. People in undeveloped countries had less resources to start with - they couldn’t make Tagons or sacrifice dozens of books to make armor - but they were probably also in a much more stable situation. If you couldn’t rely on your electric grid to stay up in normal circumstances, if there were only one or two cars in town, you could probably move on with your regular life just fine when aliens took those things away.

It went way beyond making us more entertaining, too, or at least I thought it did. That much had been obvious from the second they'd kicked this off. I might not have owned guns personally, but there was more than one gun in America for every man, woman, and child to be packing. The leafenrats were intimidating to face in hand-to-hand combat, but they weren’t that sneaky or strong. I had little doubt that if guns had been working, our neighborhood would have been cleared out in under an hour after this crap started.

No, what suddenly occurred to me was that without our technology, even people from first-world countries probably looked like we lived much more primitively than we actually did. I mean, yeah, I was living in a fairly sizable house, but the Aztecs built multi-story intricately-carved stone temples, and popular history still wrote them off as a less-advanced culture, basically just because they’d been taken down by disease and couldn’t defend themselves. I mean, the Aztecs had public schools. Aqueducts! Calendars! Drills! Astronomy! Math! They may not have had gunpowder or advanced metallurgy, but they were a legitimate empire.

But most people perceived them as primitive.

Why?

We’d never seen their society live. They’d almost all died before European settlers really arrived in the area. The Europeans hadn’t seen Aztec culture: they’d just met with the sad and shattered remnants of a massive disaster, and felt that what they saw told the whole story.

Pointy had said she’d heard and seen different types of aliens commentating on the broadcasts. Maybe humans were uniquely argumentative, but the fact that death games were popular entertainment seemed like pretty good evidence the rest of the galaxy wasn’t filled with cooperative aliens respecting each other’s differences and singing “Kumbaya.”

I doubted all of the species in this Commonwealth agreed perfectly on any topic, let alone something extreme like this Maffiyir. Making us seem more brutish and uncultured would definitely give us less in common with the advanced civilizations watching. There had to be voices speaking out against what was happening to us, but it was probably easier for everyone to dismiss those voices when all they saw was us fighting like savage animals.

That was pure speculation at this point… but I felt like I was on to something.

Pointy’s squeaky voice interrupted my train of thought. “I actually did have a set of files I’d flagged for atypical or counterintuitive occurrences. I just ran a quick scan on them and… yes. I do see several structures that show evidence of advanced technology. I can’t promise blueprints for those will be available, but it does seem likely. Given this, I would advise you not to spend your money on these initial offerings.”

I felt my mouth stretch in a smug smile as she changed her tune. It took a lot of self control not to mouth pocket calculator at her.

Actually, would that be such a bad idea? A little teasing brought people closer together, right?

A series of hefty thumps on our front door distracted me from Pointy.

We had a visitor.