The week passed by quickly. Every morning started at the University with dad and every evening ended with a ride home from Uncle Magnum. In between those two jobs, I either practiced with my field or I was thinking of new ways to test the field. It turned out that anything I wore would be encompassed by the field; even if I put on two jackets and wore snow-pants over my jeans. Anything that I held would also come with me. If I dropped something or took it off and let it go, then it would leave the field and go back to what I was starting to simply call ‘Reality’. With reality being the everyday world around us, I decided to call the place inside the field as ‘Reality 1” or R1 for short.
That would have to do for now, but I knew that there was a lot more to the field. There was a way to go much deeper. I had seen that during the bus incident when I had gone through various layers of reality. One layer was without people, another layer was without the bus and the final layer was without buildings. What I was doing now with the field didn’t match up with that experience. I was in a reality where there were people, cars and buildings, only they were greyed out and I could go through them. Why couldn’t I go through the buildings?
I was hoping that as I got stronger at holding the field, I’d be able to do new things with it, including walking through walls. In the meantime, I could now hold the field for over ten minutes before the strain became too much. I’d need at least an hour of continuous field time for what I had planned and so I continued to practice for hours each day. Besides, it was a ton of fun. With the longer field time I was able to go out to busier places, like the mall, and run through people and stores and racks of clothing and food court tables. I also followed people and listened in on their conversations, I watched them put their passwords into their phones, I read their email and texts over their shoulders. I’m quite nosy it seems, but I did learn that most people have really boring conversations. I suppose I should have known that, given my own useless texting, but knowing something in concept is not the same as facing the reality of it.
When I couldn’t hold the field for much longer, I usually took a break in the bathroom. Not wanting anyone to see me appear and disappear, it only made sense to go into my own stall. As long as there weren’t too many people in the bathroom, no one would notice my comings and goings. I would just leave the door locked when I left the stall and it was still locked when I returned. When I got tired of holding the field and needed a break, I just walked out of the stall and sat in the food court for a bit. Then I went to the bathroom to disappear again. I learned something else during these practices. Way too many people weren’t washing their hands after going to the bathroom. Ick!
Another way that I really enjoyed practicing with the field was to play in traffic. I started off by crossing the street without looking both ways. It’s harder than you think, even when you know that you won’t get hit by anything. Looking both ways is something that we were all taught at an early age and it’s a very difficult habit to break. I even look both ways when I’m crossing a one-way street. I ended up just closing my eyes and running into the middle of the street. After doing that a few times, I upped my game by running out into the middle of an intersection and dodging around incoming traffic. Sometimes it worked and sometimes the car would slam through me and I would get a quick second glimpse into the interior of the car. Who knew that so many people left their trash in the backseat?
Saturday I finally got to sleep in. It was glorious. Uncle Magnum had some afternoon classes, but he didn’t need my help, so I lounged around, ate brunch and spent some quality time binging Netflix. Hours later, feeling antsy from having done nothing all day, I found myself sitting on the floor of my room and turning on the field. I wanted to try something new, something that was based on what I had learned this week. The field expanded to encompass what I was wearing or holding, but it did it without my conscious thought. Could I expand the field on purpose? Could I expand it in any shape that I wanted? I don’t see why is shouldn’t be possible. As usually, the trick would be to figure out how.
Being able to hold the field on for longer had given me a much better sense of it. I had more time to really examine its capabilities. Last time that I experimented like this, I’d turned the field on and off by pushing and pulling against the field. Now the goal was to see if I could feel what was going on when I added something to the field. I leaned over and tried to pick up my book from the nightstand. Oops! My hand went right through the book and the nightstand, I overbalanced and fell onto the floor.
Sitting upright again, I turned off the field, grabbed the book and turned the field back on. I carefully examined the sensation of the field where the book and hand met and I found two surprises. First, the book was in its own field that was connected to mine. Where my hand field met the book field, the two fields merged into one. I wonder if the two fields could separate or if the book field grew out of the field that surrounded me. I took a few seconds to examine my pajamas. Were they in their own separate, but connected, fields as well? They were! I was realizing that I was missing clues because I wasn’t asking the right questions or not paying enough attention to the details.
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The second surprise was that I could feel the pressure of my fingers and palm on the book. This might seem normal enough, but I was feeling the pressure from both sides; from my fingers and from the book. If you press your finger against the floor, you feel the floor from your fingertip. If you press two fingers together, then you feel the pressure from each of the fingers as they press against each other. This feeling from the book side was similar to that. I realized that I was getting a slight sensation from the pressure that I was applying to the field surrounding the book. The field was giving me sensory inputs. That was so cool. I’d need to think about what I could use that for and I made a mental note to look into that later.
Part of the problem was that I was already holding the book, or wearing clothes, before I put on the field. That made sense, because I would otherwise just go pass through them, as had just happened a few minutes ago. But, if I couldn’t feel or sense a change from a state of not holding something to a state of holding something, then maybe I could do it the other way around. Grasping the book in my right hand, I focused on the fields that surrounded the book and my hand and then I slowly released the book.
The book hit the floor while I was trying to puzzle out if I had felt anything at all. I tried it again. And then again. It took what felt like hundreds of tries, but I was eventually able to feel that was happening. As the book left my fingers, the field surrounding the book would get absorbed into the field around me. It felt like the main field was sucking in the little field. I did it a few more times, really making an effort to capture the feeling of absorption that was occurring. I suppose that reversing the process would result in being able to extend the field around an object that I wasn’t touching. It seemed like every time that I got the answer to a question, more questions would just pop up. I really, really wanted an instruction manual for this field.
Knowing what reabsorbing the field felt like, I tried to do it on my own. I shut off the field, again, picked up the book, again, and turned the field on, again. Even though I has slept in and not done much today, I could tell that I was getting tired because my frustration level was notching up quickly. I’d stop after this and get a snack or two and take a short nap. This time I held the book on the palm of my hand and concentrated on my field and the field surrounding the book. Then, I applied that absorbing feeling to the field surrounding the book. It was kind of like what I had done to turn on and off the field, but this was more like drinking from a straw. I even found myself acting out the process by puckering up my lips and inhaling through a non-existent tube.
The field retracted from the book and the book fell trough my hand and onto the floor. Despite my intention to call it quits for awhile, I practiced that for another half hour, just to be sure that I had a handle on it. By the time I stopped, I wasn’t using the non-existent straw and my facial muscles weren’t even twitching. Later I’d have to try pushing out the smaller field. Break first.
It was snack time and I had a hankering for cookies. Cookies are my favorite snack and white chocolate chip cookies are my favorite cookie. For some reason, every single store-bought white chocolate chip cookie has to have macadamia nuts in it. I don’t know why. I have nothing against macadamia nuts, but they just don’t belong in my white chocolate chip cookie! That’s why I’m forced to make my own and when I do, I usually make lots of extra and keep a container of ready to bake cookies in the freezer. A quick check of the freezer informed me that I had already eaten the last of the ready to bake cookies and so I started taking out all the ingredients that I would need. Dad came by just as the first batch was coming out of the oven.
“How do you do that?”, I asked him.
“Do what?”, he asked me right back. He knew what.
“Show up just as the cookies are ready. You’ve been in the smithy all day, banging away, with barely a bathroom break. What are the odds that you’d come into the house just when the oven dings?”
“Pretty high actually. I have the entire place wired for video and the surveillance service that I hired has specific instruction to call me whenever you’re making cookies.”
“All so you could get freshly baked cookies? That seems a bit extreme. Especially since I was going to bring a plate over to you in a few minutes. You could have saved all that money and used it to buy me a car.”
“I though that you didn’t want a car. You said that your bike got you everywhere you needed to go in five minutes. Also, no drivers license.”
“Good points. Cookie?” I handed him a cookie via a spatula, and we bonded over the savory goodness of cookies. After eating a few, we added some milk and left our cares behind.