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A Strange Land

By Andrea Camoriano

Chapter 2

          Andwan immediately called her friends – family – teammates in the intensely-bonded sense it took a Minstrel to understand – together in an effort to stay calm.  Even when no one knew where they were or how they’d gotten there, theirs was still a group used to working together under any and all conditions.  If anybody could get out of this, it was the Time Teens.  All they had to do was to come up with some options, and Andwan decided they’d better get to work.  However, she was also a believer in the old adage, “First things first,” and in this case, that meant making sure all was well.

          “Is everyone all right?” she asked in a loud voice so everyone could hear.

          Dave – Rusty – Distie – Hannon – Ritis – Embry – David – Blanford – Nina – Sano – one by one, and slowly, as each one came out of a mild case of dazed shock, Andwan received a straggling chorus of affirmative answers.

          When the flash of light had come, it had given them all a jolt to their inner ears; none of them had remained farther upright than their hands and knees.  Most were sprawled on their noses, keeping as much of their bodies in contact with the ground as they could to counter their vertigo.

          Sano, being a dragon, was the first one to regain his senses and the first one back on his feet, helping the others to their knees and then to their feet.  Andwan smiled.

          Despite being dazed, the Time Teens slowly brought themselves together into a group facing each other, even if they had to crawl to get there.  As soon as they all made it and had gotten comfortable on the grass that looked as though it hadn’t been mowed in several years, the serious business began.

          “Okay, Andwan,” said Nina, “now what?”

          Andwan considered the question for a moment, trying to think how best to frame her reply.

          “Now we take stock,” she finally answered. “We’re Minstrels.  We can do this.”

          She turned to Hannon, whose Differentiated Talents were faunal telepathy with a generous dose of emotions-reading.  “We’re in the middle of a plain, right?  There has to be a host of wildlife here – bugs eating seeds on up, possibly even to carnivores to hunt the herbivores.  Do you feel up to locating some little critter or other and negotiating for information?  Because we could use as much as we can get right now.”

          Hannon nodded.  “Sure, I can do that.  Might take a little while, though.”

          “Go ahead,” Andwan answered.  “We should have a few more details hammered out by the time you get back.”  Hannon liked to speak with animals by himself; if he had to take anyone with him, it was usually his teammate Distie, who had a talent for tracking, or Mr. Elfreth, their school’s tracking instructor.  He claimed one person alone, or two at most, was easier for the animals to deal with and frightened them less, which in turn made the animals easier to handle.  Andwan let Hannon have his way on that whenever she could; it was his Differential, and his ways often got results.  As soon as he had her permission now, Hannon got to his feet and staggered away to find a good animal-conversation site upwind of the group to avoid offending the noses of any local wildlife.  If the scent of humans scared them away, Hannon couldn’t do his job, and Andwan’s job would become much harder.

          Now, Andwan turned to the rest of her team.  “While he’s doing that,” she told them, “we’re going to see if our Common Pots can find any nearby settlements telepathically.”

          The others agreed – they all knew how “noisy” even a small settlement could be to their telepathic abilities.  Regular people couldn’t “hear” each other in their heads and had no need or ability to shield their thoughts.  After all, who could hear them?

          They merged their talents, as they had done so many times before in school and on missions, in order to amplify their collective abilities.  Like a seven-armed radar sweep, they began to mentally sweep concentric rings with themselves at the center of the hub like a nautilus shell, searching for other minds in the area.

          The results were disappointing.  Although together they were able to probe a greater area than any of them could handle alone, the only mind any of them could recognize as human within a radius of several hundred miles was Hannon’s here at the hub with them.

          “Well,” Nina said, a bit sarcastically, “that was productive.” 

          “Actually, it was,” said Ritis, who had served as Andwan’s tacit second-in-command ever since the Time Teens had come together and was familiar with many of Andwan’s strategic ins and outs.  “We’re establishing a minimum range we’ll need to travel before we run into anyone.”

          The rest of the group grumbled, but agreed.  However, they all felt Blanford spoke for all of them when he said, “I dunno, guys – is it a good thing or not that we ain’t found nobody yet?”

          Nobody had an answer for him.

*        *        *

          A few minutes later, as they dropped wearily out of a stretched-to-the-limit scan that had turned up nothing definitive, Hannon came back with a progress report that cheered the others up slightly.

          “I found some far-ranging birds and dirthuggers,” he told them, referring to humans or animals that couldn’t fly under their own power.  “They told me that there’s a settlement some distance from here, in a line exactly halfway between the sunrise and the sunset.  The impression I got was that it was due south of here, about three days as the predatory dirthugger runs and considerably less as the crow flies.”

          The rest of the crew looked at each other in bewilderment.  Surely their scan had covered more territory than that!

          Unless the birds and dirthuggers here moved even quicker than their counterparts back home . . . !  But how could that be possible?

          Andwan shook off her confusion for the time being.  “Well, now we’ve got a direction and something to aim for.  Ideas?  Suggestions?”

          “Ah says we send you to do some scouting,” Rusty put in.  The rest of the team agreed.

          Andwan sighed.  Rusty’s hillbilly speech patterns aside, he had a good head on his shoulders when he decided to get serious; his suggestion was a good one, and Andwan would not have remained in command of her group through even their first mission longer than it took her to sneeze if she didn’t know how to listen when her teammates said something.  It could end up saving all their lives . . . or losing them.  This suggestion had the potential to do the former, and she knew it.

          So did her teammates.  And each knew that the others knew.

          Well, Andwan thought, since we’re all in agreement on this, then . . .

          She looked at Ritis and her two siblings.  “You three are joint leaders until I get back to the group in person,” she told them.

          They nodded; it was a drill they’d done in the field many times before.  “And may you be back soon,” Sano told her.  “The sooner, the better.”

          “I hope so, too,” Andwan said with a grin for her whole team.  “I can’t wait to be back.”

          With that, she stood up, spread her wings, and took off, winging her way south toward Hannon’s promised settlement.

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