The area actually did have rangers who looked after it.
Horribly understaffed, underfunded rangers but still rangers and it didn't take to long to get a couple to ride down in a jeep.
Well they didn't drive literallythe entire way. The trees were kind of problematic for that but close enough to get there in a short hike.
I offered to carry the bear the distance between but that apparently was a very bad idea so instead I just waited until they showed up.
Naturally they flinched once they realized, oh hey something is up with that guy, and there had actually been a short period where one of them thought they really should bring in the PRT on all of this.
That had lead to a surprisingly civil debate on the technicality of jurisdiction on events factoring in parahuman individuals in matters of law where their parahuman status didn't really come up in what needed to be done. I mean yeah if I'd used some kind of knock out power then maybe they should call someone but the only thing I'd done was retrieve the bear from a set of idiot poachers.
I did give a description of Tim and Jack but got the feeling there wouldn't be much follow up on this.
Unfortunately I couldn't give a sample of the tranquilizer as, like an idiot, I'd left behind the dart Tim had shot me with.
I'd gotten called out on that as well, which actually ticked me off a bit but whatever. Stupid mistake of someone very new to the wide world of actively involving myself with illegal activities.
The whole experience taught me one thing. Next time I was going on a training trip by myself in the middle of nowhere... put on a disguise anyway because no matter how far you ran, you could never outrun human stupidity.
After that it was just a mater of loading the bear up onto the jeep which involved a device somewhere between a stretcher and a net, where I met forest ranger number three, who apparently was also a vet.
After that some vitals were checked, we all stood around, I bummed some water off of them, we talked a bit about how poaching was bad and how annoying it was that there was no wifi in the area and then after a long ass wait the bear started waking up.
Since the overgrown critter seemed to largely be in good health and was already within it's natural environment that was basically the skedaddle signal for the forest brigade and the five of us went our separate ways.
Where of course I had found I'd accidentally left the laptop on while closed and drained the battery on the thing.
It was getting kind of late but there was still a good few hours of sunlight left so I set out the solar charging thing and made supper. Meditating until the sun died.
And that was the end of day four of my training journey.
Day five was a bit of a late start. I had a long if not particularly big breakfast set up the solar charger for the laptop and debated the merits of just leaving the thing to charge up while I went to the brass glade I'd created to train properly.
The crux of the matter was the laptop was expensive as hell being somewhere around three fourths of my entire material assets. And the forest while not as dangerous as some would think, it was full of things like small insects that would think nesting into the small ports or slipping between the cracks of the keys to stay in a nice, covered and warm spot would be a great idea.
Not the best thing to keep such a machine intact for long. To say nothing of what could happen if it rained.
I went with a middle ground; low mote expense training in the form of meditation and physical activity, while the thing charged up for the first few hours. I then took a short break at around noonish to actually eat lunch for once, and check my emails on the account Lisa had set up.
Not many actually, just a basic 'what's up'? From Lisa and some status reports. Alabaster was unsurprisingly broken out of jail at this point and it seemed that the Empire had started going after the Merchants, a relatively weak parahuman gang that primarily worked the drug trade.
This was because the Merchants had taken something that the Empire valued, though Lisa wasn't sure what it was yet. They'd also gained a new member, a tinker known as Trainwreck. Who had also joined up in the original timeline but as a spy for Coil.
Yeah that was probably related.
I gave a update, warned her of the connection in hopes that she'd pull together the dots somehow. Explained I'd learned a thing and was still working to learn a different thing but should be back in a few days and apologized for being so late in my reply.
Then I shut the thing off and stuffed it back in the duffle bag. I mean yeah surfing an entirely new internet would be cool and all, but I was on a time limit and I'd basically just wasted a valuable day which I should have been spending learning how to grow wings and breathe fire.
I mean really... how much longer did I have? The Empire was already picking fights and while I had no problem with their current targets it wouldn't be long before things really exploded. Don't get me wrong, I didn't consider burning a day saving three idiots and a bear to be effort wasted but I was running out of time fast.
It was time to put my knuckles to the grindstone. And considering the trick I was trying to learn? I might even have meant that literally.