At the beginning of the evening, we chat. All of us have lost people well before this change. I wonder if grief was a major killer in the tutorial. Perhaps those of us who survived were mostly folks who’d already gone through some pretty stressful shit.

For me, it was Matilda. Piyu was a Trauma Surgeon, and had come to terms with death. "Be grateful for the wins, because you're gonna lose too," was her mentor's line. Steve had a friend die next to him, fried doing industrial wiring. Apparently, unlike house electricity, when you’re wiring a restaurant, the voltages can and do kill folks. Miguel worked construction, and those guys always have some scary-ass stories. Everyone knows someone who died doing something stupid on the job, or who died in a bad accident.

Maybe there’s something about having come to terms with death, about having come to terms with people you know and care about just being gone. Folks who haven’t dealt with loss may not have been emotionally ready for Rampage the monkey in the transition.

After getting to know everyone’s mostly sad stories, we play music together. My library is a lot bigger, but I mostly go with theirs, rather than trying to teach them new stuff. It’s half songs from my old band, and half oldies. Those are a lot easier to play using real instruments than the Trance - K-Pop fusion stuff that’s the norm these days.

I lend some electric-guitar effects to Steve with my audiomancy, and then he insists on playing Foxey Lady by Hendrix to get full impact from my fuzzing his electric guitar. I want to see what Steve does with Metallica’s Ride the Lightning, and when we play, he makes quite the electric light show to accompany us. Piyu has us do some Norah Jones, and Miguel has us play a bass-line lead with Psycho Killer from the Talking Heads. We only play for a couple hours, and then head to do thaum regeneration in safe spots until dawn.

The Stinky and Dirty show rolls out in the morning. Miguel packs a bunch of metal into his pockets, and we head west. My job is to keep the tom-thaum flow going and to act as spotter. Nothing is going to sneak up on us. Between searing, watching the skies for surprise aerial monsters, and long-distance listening with my sound funnels, not to mention tomming for thaums, I stay busy through the day.

In the late afternoon we run into some critters that we can't avoid. They're a trio of ten foot tall rhinoceros beetles. Ya know, the ones that are normally an inch long, and the males have a horn as big as their body? Yeah, two females and a male are knocking over trees and eating them when we spot them. Then something spooks 'em and they end up running towards us. The rest of the team isn’t fast enough to get away, so we get ready to fight.

As they head towards us, Miguel pulls some metal poles out of his pockets, and then starts to mold them into ten foot long spears. Steve looks like he’s trying to get his lightning going. Priyanka is watching and directing. As they get closer, she asks me to distract them. Fair enough. They don’t seem fast enough to catch me.

As I run off to see if I can distract them, Priyanka calls out, “Watch out. Rhinoceros beetles are the strongest creatures on the planet by body-weight. And these ones have a lot of body weight.”

They’re 50 yards off, and running at a human sprinter's pace towards all of us. I noise-hammer them with a cone of loudness. They all stop for a second, and then the male hammers me back with an even louder sound. It’s some sort of hissing shriek. I’m glad that I have built in ear protection, and that sound volume drops fast. Otherwise, the people behind me might be going deaf.

Faster thinking, even the little bit I've got, lets me do a quick analysis of the sound of the beetle hiss. After the third hiss--only the big one in the middle is hissing--I capture the sound. Two seconds later, I increase the volume by ten percent, drop the pitch a bit, and send it back at him. In response, he charges. His girlfriends come with. I exit stage left, moving away from my friends, and hissing at him repeatedly.

My suspicion is that beetle-boy doesn’t find this as funny as I do. On the other hand, having a hissing contest with an elephant-sized beetle that is supposedly super-strong for its size might make some folks laugh. If the comedians were slower than me, they'd have a bad day coming. Fortunately, the beetles are only sprinting at ten yards a second, and I can do better than four times that for short distances. So I run in circles hissing at the beetles, and they chase me while Miguel sets up a defensive perimeter. In thirty seconds, I’m getting a bit tired of keepaway, but Miguel has a spear-wall set up facing us, and the clouds by us are looking a bit scary.

Priya motions for me to head their way, so I zip over, behind the spear wall, leaving the beetles almost twenty seconds behind. Steve, off to the side of the spear wall in a separate defensive dome, does some sort of rain dance move, and one of the flanking beetles gets speared by a lighting bolt from the clouds. The thunder that follows from the lighting strike eighty yards off is louder than the hissing contest was.

That beetle is either down for the count, or at least on a smoke-break, so we’ve only got two to deal with. I add more hissing to draw the beetles in my direction. They oblige by continuing towards us. While they’re still 50 yards away, Steve makes an ear-cover motion, and lighting strikes the second flanking beetle. It's now smoking as well.

The last beetle charges me, as I make hissing noises past the spear barricade, while the rest of the band hunkers under the well supported dome off to the side.

It seems to think that its giant horn is a match for the spear wall. One large crash later, it seems that the beetle was mostly right. The metal spears are a twisted hunk, and only four of them are sticking out of its carapace. The metal supporting the spears and the metal platform that was anchoring them are all twisted and broken. On the not quite right side, the rhino beetle now has five horns, rather than one, and the extra four are ten foot metallic spears poking partly into his shell. It's elephant-sized, stronger than a tank, and tougher than metal. This somehow doesn't seem fair.

Steve starts shooting small lightning bolts from his fingers at the beetle, and they are all hitting the lighting rods leading into the critter’s carapace. It’s smelling a bit like cooked meat when the beetle opens its carapace, and starts to fly off. Why did I think that fighting a multi-ton beetle that can supposedly lift a giant sequoia was hard enough? No, it can fly too. Fortunately Steve is on the job. I hiss loudly at the flying tank and throw some other random loud audiomancy to confuse it. Miguel throws a couple pretty scary looking spears that mostly bounce off the carapace, but we manage to keep it around for long enough for Steve to call down lightning from the clouds again. And somebody is acting like a high elevation lightning rod.

Turns out wings don’t survive direct strikes from lighting. Neither do beetles when there’s a direct conductive path to their squishy insides.

We figure out that the other two beetles were injured, but not dead, and that requires some cleanup. With them mostly unmoving, it’s easy enough to get Miguel to line up a shot and super-accelerate a spear through one of them. Steve handles the other one by calling down his fourth bolt of lightning.

Each dead beetle is worth thirty-six oranges, so we each collect twenty-seven. Stinky is happy because no one is injured for a change. Steve is talking about how cool he was, killing most of the beetles, and Miguel is upset that the spears were too flimsy, and the metal too weak for the carapaces. Stinky comes by to tell me that was the first fight in a while that no one got hurt, and that the prep time was invaluable. Then she heads over to discuss improvements in the defensive fortifications with Miguel and we continue our travels.