Uncle Magnum had put me through the ringer again and I woke up later than usual the next day. I hoped that Sifu Zhang would come to test me soon. I couldn’t do this for several more weeks. I got out of bed and got ready for the day, including spending half an hour stretching away my aches and pains. My original plan for today was to relax, but with the new possibility of helping Evan I was out the door minutes after I’d cleaned up from breakfast.

My research into cancer yesterday had brought up something very interesting. More and more often, dogs were being used in cancer research since they get cancer just like people do. Many drugs developed for humans were being used to treat dogs and knowledge gathered from dogs with cancer was being used to better understand human cancer. Not having ever owned a pet, I hadn’t known that dogs got cancer, but it got me to thinking about training my cancer removal abilities on dogs.

I know that animal rights activists would get all upset by what I planned to do, but I just couldn’t see the harm in trying to cure dogs that were going to be euthanized anyways. As long as I made sure that what I did to the dogs didn’t cause them any pain. Who knows, I might even be able to save a few of them.

My truck was waiting for me right in front of my house, in L2. I shifted to L2 and tried to open the door. It wouldn’t open. The door handle wouldn’t budge. I was pretty sure that I’d left the car unlocked. It wasn’t like there was anyone around to steal it. I tried sticking the key in the door lock, but it wouldn’t go it. The lock was jammed. What the hell was going on?

I stood there thinking for a bit. Everything had been fine when I’d parked it yesterday. I’d driven it here in R2 and sent it to L2 as I went inside. Hmmm. Could there be a difference about L2? I shifted myself and the car to R2 and tried the door again. It opened easily. That was so weird. I’d need to test that out later though. Right now, I had work to do.

I parked my truck in front of the local animal shelter and left it in L2. I’d been to the shelter once before, when I was twelve years old. Dad had finally relented and agreed to let me get a dog. I’d pestered him for years about it and he’d always explained that we didn’t need the additional hassle of having a pet. I’m not sure what made him change his mind, but I didn’t want to him to change it again so I begged him to take me to the animal shelter right away. A half hour later we were back in the car, without a dog, and an hour later my pet allergy had been confirmed by my pediatrician.

In order to avoid another concentrated dose of animal dander setting off a round of sneezing and hives, I mostly stayed in R1 during my visit, only shifting occasionally in to R2 to walk through doors. The shelter had some pets displayed at the front of the center, but most of their animals were housed in kennels at the back. Even all greyed out, as they were in R1, the dogs were so cute and fluffy. I really wanted to play with them. I restrained myself, both because of the potential hives and because my hands would go right through them.

In front of the kennels there was a six-foot passageway where people could look in on the dogs and decide which one they wanted. Currently two families were taking an inspection tour. One family had two young children and they seemed to have settled on a gorgeous Labrador Retriever. The little girl wanted to name him Cuddles and I wanted to shake some sense into her on behalf of the dog. Going through life with the name Cuddles had to be so humiliating for the dog. The other family had a teenage son, around fourteen years old and they were walking back and forth in front of the cages, looking for some connection to take place. The boy was trying to look nonchalant as his parents called out suggestions, but his eager eyes gave him away. He really wanted a dog.

Sitting down in the hallway and shutting out the babble of the two families, I wrapped the dog in the leftmost kennel in a field and scanned him quickly, looking specifically for cancer. Cancer was one of the first illnesses that I’d learned to recognize with my field and I inspected each dog for it. I found my first customer in the seventh kennel, just to the left of the Labrador that I prayed wouldn’t be named Cuddles. He was an older husky and had a slight limp in his right foreleg as he paced in his kennel. The cancer mass wasn’t very big, but it was in his elbow and it obviously bothered him. He kept stopping and holding up his leg for awhile to ease the discomfort. Only the excitement of having children nearby got him to stand up and pace.

Finding the tumor was the easy part. Knowing what to do about it was the hard part. In this case, the mass was growing from the bone and while I could get rid of the protrusion, that didn’t mean that I was curing the cancer. In fact, there was more cancer in the bone. It had penetrated about ten percent into the bone. Would a slightly thinner bone be a health problem for the dog? I just didn’t have the years of study and experience to be able to answer that.

In the end, my decision to try the tumor removal wasn’t based on my need to practice with my talent, but rather it was just that I couldn’t leave that husky in pain. I fortified myself with the knowledge that the cancer was a death sentence for the dog. If a family were to adopt him, they might pay the cost of a leg amputation for the dog but barring an adoption the shelter would certainly elect to euthanize the dog. Anything that I did wouldn’t be worse that death or dismemberment.

The next time the husky lay down to rest, I tried encapsulating the protruding part of the tumor. The field ended up surrounding the entire tumor. Until now, I’d had only put a field around an entire object and reshaping the field to cover only a part of an object apparently needed more direct control. Covering only half of the tumor right away seemed to be a non-starter. To get the hang of it, I needed to work with the field surrounding the whole tumor and pull it back from there.

Learning how to contour the new edge of the field so that it molded to the shape of the bone took even more time and by the time I got the hang of it, the dog had become restless and started moving again. Wrapping a moving person in a field is something I’d done with both Charlie and Uncle Magnum. However, doing the same thing with half a small tumor in the leg of a moving dog was a bit beyond me so far. I had to wait for the dog to lay down again and while I did that I continued to examine the rest of the dogs.

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Only two other dogs in the shelter had cancer. A poodle type dog at the end of the row had some sort of cancer in it’s blood cells that I couldn’t do anything about. I’d only been able to detect the cancer at all because of the exercises micro-scanning that I’d done yesterday. The other dog, a bulldog, had a similar cancer to the husky’s, but in the back leg. I’d see what I could do for her after the husky.

As soon as the husky settled down again, I sent the protruding part of the tumor into L2. I held my breath in anticipation. Great. Now the dog was just laying there, panting away and looking so damn cute. I let out my breath and waited. I didn’t want to try anything else until I was certain that I hadn’t injured the dog. At least he didn’t seem to be in any pain so far.

The family left the kennel with their new dog. I shook my head in resignation as the little girl kept calling him Cuddles. Meanwhile, the teenager seemed to have settled on an adorable Irish setter puppy. A few minutes later, I was alone with the dogs and I made my way over to the husky. With no one around now, the dog didn’t look like he was getting up anytime soon. I was tempted to return to reality and get him excited enough to stand, but I remembered that there were cameras overlooking this corridor.

Feeling frustrated with the delay, I took a chance on no one noticing his absence for a few minutes and used my field to send the husky into L2. Following a mere second behind the dog, I appeared next to him and stood there watching him. He was still lying down. I would have expected him to be surprised at the change in venue or to react to my appearance, but he didn’t. I bent down for a closer look and saw that he wasn’t moving at all. His eyes weren’t blinking, his tail wasn’t swishing, and he wasn’t even breathing. This reminded me of the L2 effect that had stopped me from getting into my truck earlier.

For several moments I thought that maybe I’d killed the dog by bringing him into L2, but he didn’t look dead. It seemed more like he was frozen. Poking his side elicited no reaction from the dog. Unlike the truck, he seemed pliable enough and I was able to move his fur as I ran my hand over his back. That was a bit different than the truck, where I couldn’t even fit the key in the lock. How were they different?

Using the field surrounding the dog, I scanned him and found that I was getting almost no alarms from him at all. When I focused on it, the cancer was still giving out a light buzzing sound, but all the rest of the alerts that would normally come through weren’t there. As far as the field was concerned, he could almost be a stuffed animal dog. With nothing moving inside the dog, I guess there couldn’t be any alerts.

Suddenly, I realized how the dog and the truck were different. I’d removed the field from the truck when I’d left it in L2, while the dog still had his on. I quickly removed the field from the husky and touched his fur. It wouldn’t change direction as I brushed it. I could still pick him up and move him around, only now I couldn’t alter anything about the dog himself. Even his tail couldn’t be moved. He seemed to be in stasis. He was still alive, but it’s as if he’d been put on pause.

All this new information left me with one big question. Why could I move in L2, but the dog couldn’t, even though we both had fields around us? I rolled the question around in my mind, again looking for any differences. Could it be that my base field had something to do with my being able to move in L2? I already knew that my base field acted differently from fields that I projected onto other things or people. For instance, the base field always surrounded me and couldn’t be dismissed, as the other fields could. Also, the base field didn’t continually scan me and give me feedback about my health. I needed to wrap myself in a second field to get that information.

Whether the difference was due to my base field or not is a question that would have to wait. I needed to focus on the task at hand and get back to the frozen dog. Evan’s life depended on it.

Taking the dog back to where I’d picked him up, I lay him back on the floor and shifted him back to reality and me back to R1 to observe. His reaction was surprising. He immediately stood up and barked, looking around from side to side, sniffing the air. He was confused. I think that he could smell me on his own fur, as I’d held him in L2, but he couldn’t see me. He started pacing his kennel and letting out a little whine every now and then. I felt so bad for him that it took me almost half a minute to notice that he wasn’t limping. Yes! I’d made him better, at least temporarily. He still had cancer, only now it wasn’t affecting his leg.

While I waited for him to calm down, I went over the now sleeping Bulldog and removed the cancer in her back leg. I didn’t go with half measures this time and took the whole thing out in one shot. Her cancer was even smaller than the Husky’s and wasn’t even causing her pain yet. Once the mass was removed, I zoomed in on where the cancer was, carefully inspecting the edges to see if there were any cancer cells left over. Ugh! There were still plenty of cancer cells all along the edges.

Although I’d taken away over 99% of the cancer, that last 1% still represented a lot of cells and going after them one cell at a time was going to take forever. There was also the fact that I couldn’t get my field small enough to encapsulate just one cell. Those things were like 5-10 microns tiny. They made grains of sand look big in comparison. However, I’d read that if some cancer cells were left untouched, then the cancer could return.

It took an hour of painstaking work to get all of the cells out of the Bulldogs leg. Where I could, I encapsulated bunches of cells together, taking out some good cells with the bad. The job left me feeling exhausted and I knew there was no way I could do the same kind of job for the Husky. Instead, I opted to go bigger and use multiple fields. First, I removed the remaining cancer in the bone. Next, I created a field to fit into the area in which the mass used to be. I surrounded that field with another field that was a few cells bigger and then I shifted everything between the two fields to L2. A quick zoomed-in scan later and I confirmed that the husky was virtually cancer free. A few pockets of cells that I’d missed when removing only part of the cancer had moved a bit away from the immediate area. A few minutes of hunting and pecking for them and I was done.

I looked at each of the dogs and neither seemed the worse for wear and they were both cancer free! I had really done it. Oh my God! This was unreal. The implications of this were incredible and I was still having a hard time coming to grips with it. If Evans’ cancer was similar to that of the dogs, I had real shot at helping him.

Excitement thrummed though my tired mind, as I got some tissues from the bathroom and returned to L2 to gather up the cancerous cells. It was quite disgusting, but it had to be done. I hated leaving a mess behind and I was going to be back here several more times over the next several days. I would need more practice sessions before I was going to try this on Evan. Nothing could go wrong when I was working on Evan. Nothing.