You’d think that I would eventually learn not to be so impulsive, but I felt pretty confident that I wouldn’t get stuck in L1. The bus incident had proven that. Even without conscious control of my abilities, I’d been pulled back to reality. How that worked, I had no idea, but I should be able to figure it out, in time.

Giving my field my full concentration, I became aware of two things. First, it wasn’t taking any power to stay here. Whenever I was in R1, I used up some energy to stay there and as I became stronger in using my ability, I was able to stay in R1 for longer and longer periods of time. However, it always used power. Now it was like I was in reality and didn’t need to expend effort to stay. I had re-anchored myself and L1 was my new ‘home-base’.

This fact was confirmed to me by the second thing that I realized, namely that the field that always surrounded me, my base field, was now attuned to a different frequency than before. The frequency matched the L1 field that I’d been holding.

Damn. In the back of my mind, I’d been counting on my field to stay at the same frequency as it always had. Now I needed to think of another way to get back to reality and a cold sweat enveloped me.

I wasn’t panicking yet, but the possibility of being stuck here was starting to make me nervous. Any food here would be tied to reality and I wouldn’t be able to move it, much less eat it. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There was no need to worry. I just needed to experiment and see what combination of fields I could use to get back to reality.

The next several minutes were spent trying different combinations of fields to see which ones would get me home. Since my base field was now L1, I tried combining it with an R1 frequency field. Nothing happened. I guess it was incompatible with the L1 field or the combined wavelength of the two fields didn’t result in reaching a new layer or a sub-layer. I tried the R2 and R3 fields with similar results.

I hit paydirt when I superimposed the L1 field with another L1 field and ended up in L2. I was still in my room, but now it was empty. Four bare walls and openings where the door and the window used to be. I got up to look outside and saw that the parked cars along the street were gone, as were the bushes and the trees.

This time I was bright enough not to simply turn off the L2 field. I removed the outer L1 field and returned to L1. I’d go back later and experiment to see if two overlapping L2 fields would bring me to L3 or what would happen if I combined an L1 field with an L2 field. Right now, the priority was getting back to reality.

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It didn’t seem like an L1 field could be combined with any other field that I know of to get me back to reality. That meant that I’d have to change my base shield back to the frequency of normal reality. I’d tried combining it with R1, R2, and R3 fields and that didn’t work. If I tried surrounding it with two additional R1 fields that would be the same as another L1 field and then I’d just go back to L2. The only other options that I hadn’t tried was to work with was a neutral R field;, one that wasn’t activated, or maybe a combination of two of those R fields. If two activated R1 fields sent me to L1, then two disactivated or neutral R fields might get me back to R.

That theory sounded good to me, but I still had the problem of turning the L1 field surrounding me into an R field. For several minutes I tried willing it to change and then I surrounded myself with an R1 field and tried to match two frequencies. Neither effort yielded anything useful. To be honest, I didn’t really expect them to, but I was trying to be thorough in investigating the possibilities and I wanted to be able to cross those ideas off my list before I tried my real idea.

My idea involved putting an R field between my skin and the existing L1 field. Maybe then I’ve be able to cancel the L1 field and return to reality. I really hoped that it would work, as I only had one more possibility to try after this.

It didn’t work. It turns out that the field surrounding me did just that. There was no gap between my base field and my skin in which to add another field. That left me with my alternate plan of using the field of my R1 backpack, which I always had on, to alter my L1 field. The two fields were connected, but separate, and I intended to let the R1 field frequency slowly bleed into the L1 field and take it over.

It wasn’t easy to do and it took a lot of trial an error. My cold sweat had turned into full on sweat as the minutes slowly ticked away into an hour. Eventually, I managed to create a small opening in the connection between the two fields and by pushing a lot of energy into the R1 field while drawing energy away from the L1 field, I as was able to overpower the L1 field and change its frequency to R1.

From there it was a simple matter of deactivating the R1 field, turning it to my normally passive R field and then superimposing another R field over it. The two R fields brought me back to reality.

Relief washed over me as I sat down on my bed and sank into the mattress. The softness of the bed reassured me that I was truly back in reality. I’d only been stuck in L1 for an hour and a half, but it had felt like much longer. I was tempted to lay down and take a nap. Instead, I practiced shifting to L1 and then back to reality. I let the feel of bleeding one frequency into another act as my guild to discovering how to change between frequencies and with another half hour of practice, I could go from L1 to reality in an instant.

I briefly though about continuing my experiments further, but I rejected that. I’d done enough for one day in that regard. More than enough. It was time to put my new discoveries to good use and I knew just what I wanted to do first.