I woke up early the next morning and I ached all over. Uncle Magnum took my acceptance to be evaluated by his old teacher seriously and he wanted to make sure that I was prepared. I had a feeling that the next few weeks were going to be painful. Since my technique had improved so much, Uncle Magnum decided to work on stamina, one of the things that my field couldn’t help with, and he had me alternating between the punching bag and sparring for most of the class. He and Charlie took turns sparring with me so while they each got to rest, but I had to keep going. For the first time in awhile, I sweat completely through my uniform. At the end of the night, I gladly accepted Uncle Magnum’s offer for a ride home. I could barely move.

The only cure that I knew of for sore muscles was stretching and that’s what I did, after breakfast. It was a sunny summer morning and I did my stretching in the back yard, carefully loosening each muscle group and finishing off with a cool down and some meditation. Since finding out about my field manipulation abilities and learning to control them, my meditation skill had actually gotten worse. I’d sit there, eyes closed, and keeping my breathing steady and anyone watching would probably think that I was just being in the moment. Instead, I was pushing out my field and feeling where everyone and everything around me was. I’d use my field to feel the motion of the trees as the wind picked up or I’d wrap a field around a squirrel as it chased its mate across telephone wires. Once I put a field along a stretch of road, just to feel cars roll across it.

Today I didn’t send out any fields. I stayed in my mind and worked on the problem of getting into the other layers of reality. Mark had given me three questions that were supposed to help me with problem solving. What is the problem you’re trying to solve, have you examined your assumptions, and has this already been solved by others in different industries? He said it much wordier than that, but that was what it boiled down to.

The problem to be solved was how to get into another layer of reality. Simple so far. One assumption was that there were other layers, but I wasn’t questioning that because I’d actually been in the other layers. The bus incident had a definite sequence to it. People disappeared, the bus greyed out and passed through me, the bus disappeared, the buildings greyed out, the buildings disappeared, and then I was back in reality. I hadn’t noticed the people greying out, but my mind was a little busy at the time and I was going to assume that they did grey out before they disappeared. I felt confident in that assumption and I moved on.

What else was I assuming? Was it really a sequence? It was a sequence of events as I saw them, but since the bus incident I hadn’t followed that sequence. If I were about to be hit by a bus now, I’d shift into R2 directly. Blind instinct had taken over when the bus was about to hit me. My subconscious was looking for a way out and it started going through all of its options one by one. Like if you didn’t know what channel your favorite show was on and you started at channel one and worked your way up. If you knew the channel, you’d just go directly there. This wasn’t exactly like that because I could only go to the ‘reality’ channel and increase the volume to R1 and then turn it higher to R2 and R3. I couldn’t get to the ‘layer one’ (L1) channel, or any other channel.

Questioning my assumptions didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere so I moved on to thinking outside of the box and seeing there was a solution out there from another industry or field. Hmmm. Another field?! I’d heard of gravitational fields and electromagnetic fields, but I didn’t know anything about them, except what was suggested by their very names. Mark had even explained away my abilities to Sylvie as being able to sense the electromagnetic field of the earth. Time for an internet search.

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Back in my room, I started up my computer and I did some quick reading on gravitational and electromagnetic fields and found my self out of my depth within a few sentences. Whenever I read about sciency things, my brain seems to take a holiday. Faced with the prospect of figuring out what all the terms mean, my eyes just glazed over. In this case, I did manage to gather that electromagnetic fields are composed of wavelengths, that there are different types of electromagnetic fields and that the main differentiator between the different types was the frequency of the field. The frequency describes the speed of the electromagnetic wave. Higher frequencies had sorter, but faster, wavelengths.

My brain was already hurting and I wasn’t even sure if I was understanding it correctly. That didn’t mean that it wasn’t useful. Maybe my field had a wavelength too and if I sped it up or slowed it down, then I’d get a different frequency and reach a different layer of reality. I looked up how to change a frequency and didn’t come up with anything that I thought would be helpful, until I came across a mention of having the field pass through something else. There hadn’t been anything around me during the bus incident for the field to have passed through and change its frequency, so passing the field through a physical object wasn’t the answer. What else could I pass the field through? A few moments of search brought up the term ‘frequency doubling’. I didn’t understand what it was, but the name itself gave me an idea that I needed to try out right away.

Although I didn’t need to sit on my floor to work out how to use my field anymore, I had gotten into the habit of doing so when I tried new things and so I grabbed a blue pen and a black pen from my desk and sat down on my floor. I placed the pens in from of me, each a few inches apart from its neighbors, and wrapped them in their own individual fields.

Focusing on the blue pen’s field, I pictured it as a wave and tried to speed it up by making my imaginary waves shorter. As I expected, nothing happened, but I had to give it a try. Next, I spent a few minutes trying to feel the wavelength of the field. I managed to feel a pulsing in the field, but I had no way of getting it to pulse faster or slower. That left me with my ‘frequency doubling’ idea.

When I had created my protective shield, I used the concept of multiple fields surrounding each other. This time I superimposed one field on top of another and created a new combined field, but the pen stayed where it was. For a few minutes I was stumped about what do to and then I realized that I hadn’t activated either field. I tried again, this time superimposing an R1 field over the inactivated field around the pen. I felt the pen slip into R1. That didn’t seem to do much. I could have had the same result with just an R1 field. I tried activating the first field to R1 as well. This time, the pen disappeared from my senses completely. Success!? Kind of. Where was the pen and how do I bring it back?

The pen was gone and I couldn’t even sense it, but I could still sense the new combined field. It pulsed a little faster than a single field did, as if it had a new, higher, frequency. I could also feel that the field was pen shaped. At first, I though that I just couldn’t sense the pen because it was no longer even partially in this reality, but as I continued to focus on the field around the pen, I started to ‘see’ the pen again. It was very faint and I had a feeling that this was yet another aspect of the field that I’d need to strengthen through practice.

Wrenching my thoughts back to the blue pen, I turned off both fields at once to see what would happen and I lost all sense of the pen shape. The pen didn’t return to reality and I had no way of getting it back.

Turning to the black pen, I set up the dual R1 fields and sent it to where the other pen went. After the pen disappeared, I turned off the second field that I’d added and the pen reappeared, in R1. Yes! I still needed to be sure of just where I was sending the pen when I used to the combined field, but at least I could get it back. I released the pen from its fields and gathered my thoughts.

Then I did something monumentally stupid. Without thinking it through, I shifted to R1 and superimposed another R1 field around myself.