I got home in time for a late breakfast with dad. He offered to make me some eggs, but I felt the need for a sugar-packed bowl of cereal. While he busied himself at the stove, I got out my Cinnamon Toast Crunch, along with a bowl and some milk, and dug in.
“What are your plans for the rest of the day?”, dad asked as he used the spatula to turn over his omelet.
“I’m going to start off with a nap. That bike ride took a lot out of me. This afternoon I figured to head out to the hospital and check in on Mark. I think he’s being released today or tomorrow.”
Dad smiled, “It’s tomorrow morning and his parents have invited us to have dinner with them tomorrow night before they go back home. Do you want to go?” From his tone, I got the impression that he was looking for a reason not to go. Since mom disappeared, Dad was never eager to go out on any social outings with strangers. He’d go for my sake, but I knew that it would be a chore for him, so I gave him an out.
“I’d love to go, but you don’t have to babysit me, if you’d rather not go. I get along well with the whole family.” I could see the relief on his face. He really didn’t want to go.
“Ok, then I’ll let them know that you’ll be there. I was hoping to finish my latest creation this weekend. It’s almost done.” Sometimes dad discussed his artworks with me and sometimes he liked to surprise me. This piece was the latter and I knew that asking him what it was would be a waste of time.
“I can’t wait to see it. Whatever it is.” I really couldn’t. He hadn’t let much slip about this one, but I knew that it was really intricate and that he’s spent months working to get it just right.
After rinsing out my bowl and putting it in the dishwasher, I headed to bed. I had no trouble falling asleep and I didn’t wake up until my alarm did its job around two in the afternoon. I woke up and got ready to go to the hospital. I checked my phone for any messages and saw that I’d forgotten to turn it back on after closing it this morning. I hadn’t wanted anyone to be able to track where I was.
There were a two of messages from Bobby, thanking me for my ‘help’. Northfield went down hard, 49-14. I’d call him back later. Eva had also texted me to see what I was up to today. I wrote her a quick note that I was heading to the hospital to see Mark, but that I had no plans for tonight. Before leaving the house, Eva had already remedied the ‘no plans’ situation. Pizza at Big Julie’s with a bunch of friends.
Getting back on my bike didn’t thrill me, but with several destinations to get to, I wanted the freedom of going where I wanted to and not being restricted to bus routes. As I was leaving the house, I made a last-minute decision to shift to R2. In R2, I wouldn’t have to deal with cars or traffic lights.
It was truly a joy to have the roads to myself. Sure, there were ghost cars everywhere, but those could be ignored. I didn’t have to stop at all getting to the hospital and I was able to stay in the middle of the road the whole time. No sidewalks for me! I tried to image how awesome it would be to drive a car in R2. No stop signs, no lousy drivers, no traffic lights, no traffic jams, no worrying about getting a ticket for speeding. I’d only need to worry about hitting buildings or driving into a ditch. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license and I made a mental note to start classes as soon as I could.
I locked my bike at the stand and made sure that no one was watching when I turned off its field and it reappeared. I stayed in R2. I wasn’t here just to see Mark. He was mostly just my excuse to go to the hospital.
The real reason was my strange experience with Andrew earlier in the week. My field had scanned him, like it did the metals at the forge, but I couldn’t understand what the field was telling me. I needed more data in order to interpret what the field was telling me and I hoped that the hospital could help me out. After all, the hospital had charts describing each patient’s condition and maybe I could use that as a manual. The hospital also had a lot of people with a variety of ailments and problems that could be compared to those that did not have those issues. The difference shown in these side-by-side comparison could help me to interpret the information that I was getting from the field.
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My first stop was the Orthopedics department. While I didn’t know much about the internal organs of the human body, I thought that the bones would be easy enough to understand and so it was a good place to begin. Following the signs, I arrived at the waiting room and looked around.
The most obvious person to start with was the guy sitting in the corner with a cast on his arm. The fact that he was mildly attractive had nothing whatsoever to do with my decision. Well, maybe a little, but he was sitting by himself and that meant that I could restrict the field the cover only him. Having one person in the field would limit the amount of information that I would get and prevent confusion.
I shifted to R1 and sat down next to him. He was busy on his phone and I was tempted to peak at what he was doing. I controlled my curiosity and instead surrounded him in a field. Immediately, my mind was inundated with information, none of which I could make sense of. It was like watching a Star Trek episode where the Enterprise is under attack and lights are blinking all over the bridge and consoles are beeping and you have no idea what any of those lights and sounds mean. On tv those sounds stop after 15 seconds, but with the field they just kept going. It was disorienting and annoying.
In the hopes of making some sense of the information, I tried to focus on this arm, but the overall noise of information kept breaking my concentration. I turned off the field surrounding the guy and blissful quiet entered my mind. I needed to find a way to limit the information further or find a way to make it quieter. I sighed. This is how Superman must have felt when he tried to use his super-hearing. He had to learn to listen only for what he wanted. When he just opened up his senses, he was overloaded with voices and sounds from everywhere. He had to train himself to listen for certain sounds, voices and phrases. Now I needed to do it too and it wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be.
I was feeling overwhelmed and frustrated and I was starting to doubt whether I could do this. This wasn’t like me. Having some sort of superpower, something to make me special, had always been my dream. While I’d never expected it to happen, here I was with an incredible power and I should be ecstatic. Instead, I was literally whining to myself about how hard it was and how it wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be.
Maybe I’d been doing too much lately. In the past few days, I’d discovered that I could separate R1 from R2, I’d learned to create a shield, and now I was trying to learn how to scan people. Coming from a background of Kung Fu, where learning new techniques and forms took months or longer, I wasn’t suited to this pace of learning. Slow and methodical was more my style. Also, this was my first time ever learning new skills on my own. I’d always had teachers like dad or Uncle Magnum to show me the way.
To be honest, I also think that keeping this ability to myself was starting to get to me. I wanted to tell someone about all this; to get advice or new ideas or to commiserate with. Every time I figured out how to do something new, I wanted to shout out with joy and talk about it, but there was only me and it felt that all I’d accomplished was ticking off the next item on a ‘to do’ list. It was time to rethink keeping my abilities a secret from everyone. Even Superman was able to talk to his parents about his powers. Why couldn’t I do the same?
My internal debate was cut short when the guy that I’d been scanning got up and walked into the doctor’s office. I didn’t follow him in. The distraction his departure caused let my mind get back on track and I started thinking up ways to lessen the overload. Could I scan only a part of a person? If so, which part? Would scanning a baby give me less information? Should I start with animals or birds and work my way up to humans? Could I create a field to block out the information? Why was scanning a lump of metal so different from scanning a person? Was it that the person was composed of so many parts? If so, would scanning a computer or a complex machine give me overload as well? Why didn’t I get any information about myself from my field?
Hold on a moment. Why didn’t I get information about myself? My field was on all the time. I’m a person. Why wasn’t I scanning myself every second? It could be that I couldn’t scan myself in the same way that I couldn’t tickle myself, or it could be that my base field was different than my projected fields. My base field was there all the time after all. Maybe the scanning aspect of my field was muted or shut off? If that were true, then my next step was to see if and how my base field was different.