Walking home after the pizza, I couldn’t help thinking about James’ foundation idea and how I wanted my own foundation. If he could do it, why couldn’t I. Sure, he had a plan and had been working on it for years now, but I had a new ability. If I could figure out what it did, maybe I could use it to make money. When I thought about my future, I’d always assumed that I’d work at Uncle Magnum’s school until I could open my own or that I’d make small art pieces or jewelry and sell them in my own shop. I’d considered myself lucky that I had two interests to chose from and thought that I could even work at both. Most of the kids I knew had no clue what they wanted to do after school and didn’t seem to really care. With this new ability though, I might have other options. I only needed to figure out what the ability was.
After dinner, dad went back to his home forge out back to work some more and I headed upstairs to my room. I needed to practice more and find out more about what the field really did. I started out just repeating what I’d done yesterday and tried to push up my time holding the field. After a good thirty minutes of effort, I was holding the field steady for ten seconds. This was encouraging. I had no issues with slow progress, as long as I was making some progress. I’d spent years perfecting my forms in Kung Fu and patience and determination where no strangers to me. Kung Fu is a discipline that you work on with constancy and perseverance. You have to work hard, if you want to advance any skill. Even if you have a natural talent at something, such as sports, you still need to practice. You never see the great athletes of the world sitting on their asses. They practice for hours every day, they think about their performance and look for ways to improve. They try to come up with new ways to beat their opponents. What looks so effortless to us when we watch them actually took them hundreds or thousands of hours of painstaking effort to perfect. That’s what makes them the best. Natural talent by itself is only the foundation that you build on.
That’s what I dislike the most about comic book superheroes. Besides Batman, you really don’t see many of them training and trying to push themselves past their limits. They take their natural abilities for granted. Sure, most origin stories have the hero training to use their powers for a little while, but then that’s it. They go on to fight for truth and justice and don’t take their abilities to the next level. They do learn from experience, but that’s not the same thing.
I’ve been having this argument with both Eva and James for years now. Eva defends Wonder Woman by explaining that she trained constantly at the Amazon Island, but to me it just seemed like she was working to keep up her edge; she was just maintaining. James brings up the X-men and their danger room and I try to explain to him that they’re mostly working on their team skills, not actually pushing the limits of their abilities or finding new ways to use those abilities. Think about Superman for a moment. The greatest superhero of them all. Endowed with a ton of powers, he’s the embodiment of natural talent. Now imagine Superman actually trying. Picture Superman using his super-speed, along with this heat-vision to do battlefield medicine. We often see Superman pulling people out of burning buildings or rubble strewn streets and handing them off to paramedics and he agonizes about those that he can’t save. Why doesn’t he take some time to learn to use his powers in new ways? Why couldn’t he become a doctor? He could cauterize wounds and splint broken bones and restart hearts in seconds. For that matter, why can’t he learn martial arts, for those times when he’s weakened by kryptonite? He could be at least as good as Batman. These heroes have so much potential, but almost no imagination. Only Batman, maybe because he has no powers at all, pushes himself and looks for new solutions. He studies each of his opponents before he goes up against them. He plans ahead and he builds new gadgets to cover up each of his weaknesses. He even has files on all of his fellow heroes and for each one of them he has strategies for stopping them, should they ever get out of control.
Don’t get me wrong. I much prefer Superman, although I think his taste in women really sucks. Batman is too moody. But of the two of them, Batman is a much better role model. With all that in mind, it was time to see what else I could learn about my ability.
I activated the field and everything in the room turned grey. Then I got up and walked around slowly. I put my hand on my desk and it went right through it. I quickly pulled it out. I wasn’t sure how much time I had left before the field gave out and I wasn’t sure what would happen if my hand was still in the desk when it did. I pulled in the field to shut it down and then turned it on again. This time I kept a count in my head as I walked through my bed and ran my hands though my bookshelves. At ten seconds, I made sure that I wasn’t touching anything, but the field didn’t go out. It stayed on another second. Maybe I had counted too fast or maybe actually using the field to pass through objects is better exercise than just keeping it on. I set up my timer and verified that I was up to eleven seconds. Looks like I’ll have to spend some time passing through things.
I was wondering if I could pass through walls but decided to try my closet door first. I remembered that there seemed to be an order to what I could pass through. First people disappeared, then the bus, and only then did the buildings fade away. If solidity was the key, then the I should be able to pass through a door, as it moved on hinges, but the wall would be too solid to pass through. Passing through the door was no problem. I turned the field on and walked through the door and right into my closet. I had left the light on last time I had gone in and I was able to see everything clearly. I wondered if I could see in the dark when I was in grey mode. Easy enough to check. I turned around and was about to flip on the switch when I noticed that I wasn’t reflected in the mirror that hung on the back of the closet door.
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I could still see me when I looked down at myself, but I wasn’t reflected in the mirror at all. Great, now I’m a vampire. I better not start sparkling in the sunlight. That would just be too embarrassing. Looking more closely, I could see the reflection of the clothes behind me. Then the field cut out and I was back in the mirror. I hastily put the field back up and disappeared from the mirror again. I wonder if it’s just mirrors that don’t reflect my image or if people couldn’t see me when the field was on. I’d have to check on that, but first I needed to reason this out. If I wasn’t being reflected in the mirror, then I wasn’t in normal reality. I suppose that the field could be some sort of an invisibility cloak like in the Harry Potter books, but I was also passing through objects so that wasn’t the case. Harry’s cloak only made him invisible; people could still hear him, and he could still bump into things. So along with checking to see if people could see me when the field was on, I’d also need to check if they could hear me and smell me. I pictured not showering for a week after classes and then walking by people with the field on. I’d need to think of a better way!
I heard dad puttering in the house and went out to see him. I was thinking about trying out the field in front of him, but once it cut out, I’d be caught. I had an idea of how to check it out discretely tomorrow at school. Dad was in the kitchen making lunches for tomorrow. I sat down and watched him work. "How are the gates going?”, I asked.
At Harry’s request, dad was remaking the entrance gates to the university this summer. The old gates were pretty plain and had rusted through. Harry decided that something stately, with the school crest on it, would be more impressive. Dad laughed at him and told it that it was a waste of time. First, those gates were never closed and second, Galt wasn’t some stuck up, pretentious, ivy league university that needed fancy gates to make an impression. Harry agreed with dad but explained that it wasn’t supposed to be impressive to outsiders, but for the students and their families. A lot of students took family pictures by those gates during family week and for graduation and they should have a nice background. Even if Galt was a no-frills type of university, the students still took pride in their school and posing for pictures with a rusted out ugly gate wasn’t conducive to that.
“Not too bad, Abby. I have the designs pretty much finalized and approved by Harry and now I’m just working on the specs for each part. Harry gave the ok for this to be the summer semester project, so I’m breaking the project up by levels. Even our beginner students will be able to help out. Speaking of which, I got permission to hire you as a teaching assistant this summer. You haven’t changed your mind about that, have you?
“No dad, I’ll still be able to do that. I’ve booked off every morning to work with your students and I’m going to be working four nights a week with Uncle Magnum’s students. Afternoons are reserved for reading and for research for the stock picking competition.”
“That sounds pretty packed. What about relaxing a little bit this summer?”
“It’s not so bad. I like working in your shop and I like Kung Fu. It’s much better than babysitting. Besides, Eva and James are going to be away for half the summer and the rest of my friends are going to be in camp. Terry and Jay are going on an organized trip all over Europe, so they won’t be around either. At least I’ll be making money this summer.”
“That you will. With your experience in smithing, I got you a pretty good rate, for someone your age. What are your plans for the money? Are you saving up for a car?”
“Almost everywhere I go is walking distance or a quick bike ride away. I don’t need a car yet. I’m going to bet it all on Red!”
Dad turned to me and raised his eyebrows questioningly. I quickly explained, “I’m going to invest in the companies that I research for the competition. If I do well, I’ll end up with more money. If I don’t, then I’ll have learned a valuable lesson.”
“Don’t you need an account to trade?”, dad asked.
“I was going to talk to you about that sometime this summer. I hoped that you’d open an account for me and let me trade on it. You could put a restriction on it so that I could only work with the money that I put in the account and that I couldn’t buy anything on margin.”
“I don’t see why not. I’ll even go one better. When you’re ready to start investing, I want to sit with you and Eva and James and I’d like to hear your strategy for investing, as well as why you’re investing in your chosen companies. If I like what I hear, then I’ll invest some money with you and I’ll pay you a fee of 10% of my profits, after expenses.”
“Wow. Thanks for the vote of confidence, dad, but you’ve just upped the pressure big time. I’m not sure that I want to be responsible for losing your money. I’d feel terrible if that happened.”
“I believe in you, Abby. I know that if you really work hard at this, you’ll succeed. I also know James a little bit by now and I know that he’s not a big risk-taker. I think the worst that would happen is that I’ll break even or maybe lose a little bit. I see much more upside potential than downside. Also, I’m rarely scared of investing with someone who is investing right along with me. Our interests will be aligned, and we’ll all have skin in the game. Besides, if my financial advisor was so great and knew so much, then shouldn’t he be too rich to still be a financial advisor?”
Dad had finished making lunch by then and he headed off to bed. I stayed up for awhile practicing with my field; quietly going though stuff all over the house. I don’t think that walking through tables and furniture will ever get old. The only new thing that I found out was that I couldn’t pass through walls. That was one more data point showing me that there was some sort of progression to this ability. I could pass through anything that could be moved around. I figured that with practice, I’d eventually grow past this limitation, but for now, I would build on my success. I had an idea that I wanted to try, but I’d need to be able to be strong enough to hold the field for at least a half an hour straight.