The next morning, I shifted into R1 and left the house to catch the bus to school. It was surreal walking right through people as I got on the bus and sitting down in a seat that was already occupied by a woman wearing a business suit and headphones. As the bus moved along, I found that I liked the idea of occupying the same space as someone else less and less. Her constant movement, slight though they were, kept distracting my thoughts. I decided that I would try to avoid sitting ‘with’ someone again, unless there were no other chairs available.

When my stop came, I stood up, shifted to R2 and fell right through the bus. This time, I had planned for it by bracing my legs like I was coming down from a jump and my knees flexed to absorb the shock. Not falling on my butt really made me feel like I was finally getting a real handle on my abilities.

The bus moved away, and I made my way to school, where I shifted back to reality in one of the girl’s bathroom stalls.

Today was Friday and tonight was the big game against Northfield High. Everyone was talking about it and I was virtually ignored. It was wonderful. Fame was way overrated. At lunch I sat with Eva and James, as usual, and we discussed some minor stock trades that James wanted to do. I wasn’t going to join in for this series of trades, as I hadn’t been paying much attention to the stock market this week. Besides, I wanted to wait for the next quarterly report season to get back into it and that was still a month away.

Before lunch ended, I did manage to get Eva and James to agree to join me at Uncle Magnum’s next Wednesday for a Kung Fu class. James didn’t want to, but I told him that there’d be a surprise for him if he gave it shot. Under pressure from both Eva and I, he had no chance and he grudgingly agreed. Eva pushed him extra hard, because I told her that the surprise would only be there if they both showed up. I knew that Eva would hound me for the next six days to try to find out what it was, but there was no way that she’d get anything out of me this time.

Saturday morning, I was up early. After leaving a note for dad about going out for a bike ride, I grabbed my bike, shifted both myself and the bike into R1, and made my way to the bus stop. I’d timed it well and got there just in time for the bus to show up. Unfortunately, no one else was at the stop and the bus just kept going. Shit! I hadn’t thought of that. The driver wouldn’t stop if he didn’t see anyone waiting. I quickly shifted the bike and myself into R2 and chased after the bus. The bus was faster, but I didn’t have to stop for cars or for traffic lights, so I was able to catch up two stops later. That stop had two people waiting and I had enough time to shift back to R1 and carry the bike onto the bus.

I rode the bus to its closest stop to the edge of the park that had the batting cage and I biked the rest of the way. It was still a five-minute bike ride to get there because the batting cage was at the other end of the park.

It wasn’t even seven in the morning and, as I’d planned, I was the only one there. I definitely didn’t want anyone to see the things that I wanted to try out. Hopefully, my morning experiments would be done by the time someone else showed up. With that in mind, I quickly entered the batting cage and fed my coins into the pitching machine controller. I stood watching the first few pitches and tried to envision what I wanted to do with my fields.

I was here to continue to work on my automatic defenses. I’d worked on them weeks ago, right before I’d accidentally sent out my first extended field to protect myself from Uncle Magnum’s hit. I’d stabbed a book and tried to make the field automatically shift the knife into R2 when a certain amount of pressure was applied to the field surrounding the book. I never did get it right and I’d succeeded only in so far as I’d been able to envelope the knife, but only after it pierced the book. Getting stabbed wasn’t my idea of a great defense.

I’d thought about the problem for weeks and couldn’t come up with a plan on how to turn a field on automatically. Eventually, it occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t being clear enough with what needed in terms of defense. What was I really trying to accomplish? I wanted a field that could protect me from unexpected violence, whether it was from a bullet or a knife. The field had to protect me automatically, because even if I was aware that a bullet was heading towards me, I wasn’t fast enough to stop it. There didn’t seem to be a way that I could instruct the field in what I wanted. It wasn’t a computer program where I could create an “if/then” statement such as, ‘if the field senses something coming at me very fast or it that something is sharp, then surround whatever it is in a field and send it into R2’. I could do a lot of things with the field, but I instructing it to act on its own wasn’t one of them.

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If I needed the field to act as a shield, I’d need to turn it into shield and hold it up. All the time. How to do that was the problem. My original thought was to use multiple fields, with the inner field turning on once the outer field felt enough pressure. That wasn’t going to happen, since the field couldn’t decide on how much pressure was ‘enough’. Also, an object entering the field didn’t create any actual pressure, only information that I interpreted as such. But what if I could create some sort of a trap? Once set, a trap would just sit there until it was tripped. It didn’t require any thought or further action. That’s what I needed for my shield. All I needed to do was set it up and hold it. The rest would happen on its own.

One key aspect to all this was that I needed to stay in reality while all this was going on. Keeping my ability a secret was paramount, so I couldn’t be seen disappearing into thin air whenever I was attacked. Another reason to stay in reality when I’m unexpectedly attacked was that it would also really suck if I were to send the bullet into R2 while at the same time sending myself there as well.

My solution was to use multiple fields and create an R2 zone between them. Anything passing through that field would automatically be sent into R2.

Layering those fields was the tricky part. I’d worked with two fields before, the one that always surrounds me, my ‘base field’ and another that I projected away from my body, my ‘projected field’. However, to make my shield work, I reasoned that I’d need an additional field, my ‘second projected field’. I had two reasons for this. First, I wasn’t able to turn on my personal field at the same time as my extended field. I think that I’d be able to once I got stronger, but to date I hadn’t succeeded at it. Second, due to not being able to turn on both fields at once, turning the outer field on to R2 would also send me into R2 and that was a big no-no. I reasoned that a third field would need to be set up about a foot inside the second field. This third field would be set to reality. What I was hoping would happen is that I’d create a reality sandwich with a creamy R2 filling.

Here's what was supposed to happen. A bullet would be screaming towards me in reality. It would enter my outermost field that was set to R2 and shift to R2. My innermost field, set to reality, would not exist in R2 and so the bullet couldn’t come back into reality. That innermost field would also ensure that I stayed in reality, despite the outermost field being set to R2.

If this worked, then I’d only have two worries. One, holding two projected fields was going to be tough. Two, how does this help me with a knife attack? In addition, I needed to see if I could even have two projected fields on at the same time. One base field and one projected field didn't work, but I was hoping that the projected field was sufficiently different than the base field.

I suppose that the first worry would take care of itself with practice. It would probably take months or even a year to be able to hold the shield for all the time, but I wasn’t in a rush. The second worry I didn’t know how to resolve, but I figured that once the shield was up, it would give me a warning of anyone trying to sneak up on me. That would have to be good enough for now.

With the worries put aside, it was time to see if my shield idea would work.

I stepped up to the plate, as if I was actually going to hit the ball. That wasn’t in my plans for today. I didn’t even bring a bat. However, I figured that holding a third shield would be difficult and keeping it closer to my body would allow me to keep it going for longer. I set up the outer field easily enough and then added the inner field. Finally, I turned the two fields on so that I had my R2 layer.

As expected, the strain was significant. I didn’t think that I could hold them both for more than ten seconds. I’d need to work on that. Eventually, I hoped that I could get good enough to create the shield as a whole and project both fields simultaneously and already turned on.

The pitching machine did its job and I saw the ball coming towards me. I watched the ball disappear at the same time as I felt the ball enter the R2 field. The ball sailed past me and without a cage in R2, it kept going and going. Yes! My shield worked, but also, Ugh!! I was going to have to chase down the ball later and bring it back. With another pitch about to come, I changed my R2 field to and R1 field, so that the cage in R1 would stop the ball.

I kept at it, working to extend the shield further and further from my body. Ideally, I’d be able to keep the shield at least a few feet from my body and be able to hold it all day. For now, I was just happy that I could keep it a foot away and keep it up for twelve seconds. The only drawback was that those pitches would coming in awfully close to my body and I flinched at every pitch, expecting it to hit me. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to get over that instinct.

Twenty minutes later, the next batter showed up and it was time for me to leave. The boy, dressed in his team uniform, looked to be about twelve years old and he gave me a curious look. I guess my lack of baseball bat hadn’t gone unnoticed. His eyebrows rose even higher when I left the cage, only to return a minute later with one of the balls. Given that the cage was a completely enclosed area, that shouldn’t have been possible. I simply shrugged at his questioning look, got on my bike and rode for home. Not being in a rush this time, I didn’t need to take the bus. I had a full day ahead of me and I was already exhausted.