When Sun Energy Systems put out their quarterly reports their stock fell by 40% and I almost doubled my investment overnight. Combined with the solid returns of my other stocks and the biotech company that jumped up like crazy after they announced their successful trials, James, Eva and I held a solid lead over anyone else in the competition. I was still ahead of them, only by a smaller margin, as they’d both risked more on my recommendations than last time. While I’d still have to justify my recommendations going forward, I had a strong feeling that James wouldn’t be giving me such a hard time anymore.
Dad was very impressed with our results and refused my offer to return his initial investment and only risk his gains. “Nothing has changed since our last conversation about this, except that I’m even less likely to move my money away from you. I’ll let it ride.” He also made me invest the other $30,000 that he initially wanted to give me to invest. I felt much better about taking it now that I had a proven track record.
With the next quarterly reports due in January, I had some time before I needed to go see any of the companies. That left me time to concentrate on other things, such as strengthening my ability to hold my shield and working on using the field to scan things and people.
As the weeks passed and the weather got colder, I kept up a daily routine sending out a shield every hour and holding it and my ability grew. Instead of being exhausted after half a minute and needing the rest of the hour to recuperate, I was able to hold the shield up for two minutes and I was ready to put the shield back up in half an hour.
One of the reasons for my faster progress was finding out that if I used the field in other, less tiring, ways while I recuperated, my strength grew even more. It’s counterintuitive to my way of thinking and I wouldn’t have thought to try it, if it weren’t for Eva having dragged me to the gym for another workout. The same way that I always try to get her to come to Kung Fu, she always tries to bring me to one of her workouts. She succeeds much more often than I do, because weight training has real benefits to Kung Fu.
Eva used me as a trial client, and she liked to try out new workout programs on me. She actually had several paying clients that she worked with on weekends, but I was her guinea pig. She said that if I found the workout tough, then it would be perfect for her clients.
Around Halloween, Eva gave me a new strength training program which included supersets. Supersets consist of working two muscle groups, one after the other. Instead of resting between sets, you finish one set of an exercise and immediately do a set of the other exercise that works a different muscle group. The theory behind supersets is that the muscles used in the first set will rest while you’re working the muscles of the second muscle group. Not only does this save time, but it also increases your stamina. Eva said that sometimes you could even superset within the same muscle group, if you’re going from a general exercise that hits the whole muscle group, to a specific exercise that works only one muscle in the group.
After going through that grueling workout, I wanted to see if the superset theory would hold for my strength training with my field. I assumed that the holding the shield was a general exercise that hit the whole muscle group, and that using the field to scan things was a more specific exercise.
The supersets worked wonders and through constant trial and error I learned to use my field to scan things in new ways. Sitting in class, I would surround my desk in a field and scan its materials, mostly wood and steel, but if I concentrated, I could also feel the gum on the underside of the desk and the ink and graphite on top of it. As I scanned more things, my brain became better at interpreting the data coming from the field and I started to get an image of what I was scanning. Instead of just knowing the materials in the desk, I could actually see the desk in my mind and see where the stress points were in the desk.
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Besides scanning an object by surrounding it with a field, I was also able to learn how scan by projecting a field around me. Until the superset field training, I’d always projected the field in such a way as it formed in a circle around me. However, I knew that when I brought the field closer in, it would contour to my body. Eventually, I realized that with practice and effort, I could change its shape around me and that the projected field didn’t even have to have me at its center. I was able to project a rectangular field that encompassed the entire ceiling of the classroom, including the hanging lights. The field was incredibly versatile.
Scanning people was still a problem though. Basic biology wasn’t enough to let me interpret what the field was scanning, and I’d still get headaches and become disoriented whenever I did it for too long. The solution to that problem came to me as I recalled the flashcard study session with Mark in the Geology Centre. Learning all those different rocks and minerals had improved my scanning, as my brain could associate the information that it was getting from the field with concepts and names of things that it learned. I needed to do the same thing with the human body. Once I could associate every bone, muscle and organ in the human body with a corresponding scan, I’d understand what I was getting from a scan and maybe it wouldn’t give me headaches anymore.
I went with the assumption that I was a typical example of a healthy female human and I scanned myself, one part at a time. With my phone showing an interior diagram of a human hand, with each bone, muscle and tendon clearly illustrated and labelled, I started comparing the image on the screen with the image that I was getting from an extended field that I put around my hand. It was still strange how the permanent field that surrounded me did not give me any readings at all. The secondary field surrounding my hand did give me readings and when I placed it there, I got some noise, although far less than I got from scanning an entire person. It was very interesting how the more I compared the scan to the picture with explanations, the quieter the information became. The noise that I felt was at least partially a by-product of my brain not being able to understand what the field was sending. As my brain learned to interpret better, the noise level dropped considerably and the data came in, nice and quiet. The information was just there, and I could access it or not.
My big worry was that I’d forget the name of a bone or a tendon and the noise would start up again, but that didn’t turn out to be a problem. Within five minutes, I couldn’t remember most of the names of the muscles and tendons, but the scan didn’t get noisier. Apparently, the information was in my brain and it could interpret the data without me being able to access the individual names from memory. That didn’t sit well me though. What was the point of having the information, if I couldn’t express it to others? I was determined to be able to name every structure in the body and I kept working on expanding my knowledge of the human body.
By December, I had carefully scanned my whole body and could name everything in it, even it wasn’t by its official name. I didn’t see any reason to learn new words when simpler, more common descriptions already existed, so I used fingers instead of phalanges, stomach instead of abdominal cavity, and skin instead of epidermal sheath. I also used right, left, up, down, inside and outside, instead of anterior, posterior, proximal, distal, internal and external. As long as I could describe what I was talking about quickly, that was good enough. The names that doctors used were way too complicated.
Once I’d completed my self scanning, it was time to try scanning other people again. My first targets were girls my own age at school and I soon moved on to some boys. Scanning the boys sent me back to my phone for more studying. I’d long known they had different equipment, but my brain needed more detailed information and scans to properly interpret and classify that equipment.
Over the next few weeks, I had to scale back my scanning considerably, as the end of terms exams were starting. The whole ordeal of studying all day began again and I jumped through the required hoops until the it was over. With the end of exams, I was free for two gloriously empty weeks, which I had already committed to volunteering at the hospital. What was I thinking when I’d made that decision?