In the month leading up to mom’s due date, dad became very nervous and had me scan mom and the baby several times a day. He kept worrying that the thirteen-year break in the gestation period of the baby had caused something to go wrong. I assured him, repeatedly, that everything was ok. The baby was in the correct position, the umbilical cord wasn’t wrapped around its neck, and all the baby’s organs had developed properly. There were no major alarms when I scanned either of them. Minor alarms were normal in everyone, as something was always happening in the human body.

Dad still worried. Since there was nothing physically wrong, he decided that there might be psychological trauma associated with being trapped in L2 for so long. I tried explaining that there were not side effects to being in L2 and he asked me how I could know that.

“Because my field would tell me if there were.” Dad wasn’t convinced and I offered to send him to L2 until after the baby was born and he could see for himself. He was less than amused. However, this was normal behavior for dad when it came to the health of anyone he loved, so I bore up under his worry and kept scanning for him, over and over again.

One of my biggest problems with scanning for mom and dad was their request not to be told the sex of the baby. They wanted to be surprised. That meant that I had to be very careful in how I made reference to the baby, because I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for them. Even in my own head I thought of the baby as ‘the baby’ and not as him or her.

While dad worried about the health of the baby, I had another worry altogether. Would the baby be born with the same abilities that I had? I had no clue how I’d gotten my abilities or where they’d come from. No one else that I’d ever met had a field around them and my mind kept switching between thinking that I was a mutant to thinking that there must be other people with my ability out there. If the trait was genetic, then maybe the baby would get it too. However, mom and dad, and their parents and siblings, didn’t have it. Did that mean that I was a mutant or was the origin of the field environmental? I couldn’t remember ever walking through a cloud of radioactive particles. Similarly, anything in my environment would surely have affected others around me. I simply had no clue as to the origin of my field and could only play the different options on a loop in my brain. One thing I could say for certain was that the baby did not have a field around it like I did, so far. I took that as a good sign that we’d be safe from having the baby suddenly vanish when it was stressed out and hungry. If that were to happen during the delivery room, the baby could fall to the floor in R1 or R2 and hurt itself. Although, I doubted that would be the case, as my field seemed to have a few features that protected me from misusing it accidentally.

The baby not having a field attached to its skin was a comfort, but I still couldn’t rule out the idea that it might only develop the field once it was born. If the baby developed a field, how would I deal with it? Could I suppress the field until the baby was old enough to learn to use it properly? What if the baby turned out to be mean, how would I deal with a sibling that used its powers to steal or kill for fun? How would I find the baby if it disappeared into L2 and I had to locate it quickly? What if the baby ran away at one point or was kidnapped? There were so many possibilities for something to go wrong and I set about giving the baby the full Batman treatment.

Although Batman had no super-powers, he was smart and knew how to plan for the worst. He had a plan for how to stop every member of the Justice League, should they ever go bad or fall under the control of an evil entity. He even kept some kryptonite around to stop Superman. For the baby, I needed to have my own set of plans to cover the different contingencies. These contingencies fell into three areas that I needed to research. One, field detection. Two, field suppression or negation. Three, field elimination.

Even though I had an idea concerning field elimination, I put that aside for the moment, as there was nothing that I could do to test my theory. The only thing that I’d ever successfully done to my base field was to change its frequency. Anything else I tried had failed. If the baby had a field, and I had no choice but to attempt something, then and only then would I give my theory a try. Getting rid of the baby’s field would be a last resort measure and I tried not to think about how evil the baby would have to be for me to do something like that.

Field suppression or negation was a different matter. This was something that I knew I could do as it was basically the same thing that I did now to shift between into the layers. I’d started off by overlapping fields to shift the frequencies, but by now I knew the different frequencies at an instinctual level and it was second nature to apply the correct amount of power to shift the frequencies as needed. That meant that if the baby shifted to R1, I could just shift it back to reality. I was also confident that because I’d been building my shifting ‘muscles’ constantly for the past several years, that I could essentially lock the baby in reality with a field. If I set my field up with sufficient strength, the baby wouldn’t be able to change its frequency and shift away.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Of course, this would only work so long as I was close enough to feed my field power. All bets were off when I was traveling. That line of thought led me to wonder if there was a way to leave a field in place that would power itself for a limited duration and I started experimenting with different combinations of fields. I’d done this when I’d been trying to figure out how to get into the layers, but for some reason, I hadn’t pursued it since. I felt guilty about this lack of initiative and curiosity. Wasn’t I behaving just like that character in the book I’d read, the one who had the ability to read minds? He’d had a wonderful power and he never bothered to learn it’s limits or how to control it. I looked down on him and here I was, guilty of the same lack. Yes, I’d mastered many aspects of my abilities and even discovered some new skills lately, such as pulse scanning, but it seemed that I’d put off discovering the extent of my abilities. That needed to be corrected right away.

The first thing I did was to pull out a notebook and start making a list of all the possible combinations of fields that I could make with R, R1, R2, and R3. To this list of sixteen combinations, I added the layers L1, L2 and L3, which generated a further twenty-one combinations. Sections of the list looked like this:

R1 + R =

R1 + R1 =

R1 + R2 =

R1 + R3 =

L1 + R =

L1 + R1 =

L1 + R2 =

L1 + R3 =

L1 + L1 =

L1 + L2 =

L1 + L3 =

Once I had my thirty-seven combinations, I set out to fill in the blanks. Some I knew already and filled them in right away. R1 + R1 = L1. L1 + L1 = L2. Others, like R1 + R2 and L1 + R, were more difficult to figure out because they didn’t seem to do anything or anything different than what I was already doing. For instance, combining R1 and R2 fields sent me to L1, just like combining R1 with another R1 field. Yet, I had the feeling that there was something different about it. I kept at it, trying to figure it out, when I was suddenly shifted back to R1. What the hell! One moment I’m in L1 and the next I’m in R1, without forcing a shift.

I thought about what had happened and how it felt and realized that I’d felt that feeling before. That feeling of being ripped from one layer to another. At the end of the bus incident, when I’d automatically shifted from L3 back to reality, I’d had the same feeling. Somehow, I’d recreated some of the conditions of that day. That meant that it wasn’t just a lack of power or strength that could kick me out. It was also the frequency that I’d used.

This led to hours and hours of experimentation and discovery, the upshot of which was that I learned that combining different R’s or L’s led to unstable shifts. These shifts deteriorated over time and sent you, or the object in the field, back to the whichever layer or sublayer you were in before you added the second field. I was able keep an object in the unstable shift for different amounts of time, depending on how much energy I put into the second field. Once that energy was used up in maintaining the field, it dissipated the second field and the object was left back in the first field, which would then shift the object back to whichever layer I had anchored it to as it too ran out of power.

That discovery, of time-delayed temporary fields, filled in a lot of the blanks in my list, as well as solving my issue of being able to suppress the baby’s field even while I was traveling. As long as I could set up the suppression field for longer than my trip, everything would be fine. To that end, I added some practice time each morning to build my field muscles further and extend the amount of power I could pour into a temporary field. In time I had left before the baby was born, I was able to increase that time from three days to five days. My goal was at least three weeks. That being the maximum amount of time that I’d ever been away.

Another combination that didn’t seem to do anything was that of L1 + R. Merging an L1 field with an R field, like the one that my base field always had when I was in reality, didn’t seem to do anything more that the L1 field did by itself. Yet, the combined frequency was different and I felt that something wasn’t the same. I just couldn’t figure out was it was, until I went hunting for a snack and left that field combination on by mistake. On my way to the kitchen, I passed by a greyed-out mom and it all made sense. By adding the R, a dose of reality was injected into L1 and I was able to see shadows of reality. This was the inverse of R1, where I was in reality and creating a bubble to L1. Further trials showed that L2 plus R and L3 plus R gave opposite versions of R2 and R3. Combinations of any L with R1, R2, and R3 all ended up being unstable.

With this discovery, my list was now mostly complete. The remaining combinations were those that involved combing R with itself or R with one of R1, R2, or R3. None of them seemed to do anything more when combined than they did by themselves and after hours of fruitless thought, I left them up to future me to figure out someday.