Hard work, practice, repetition, and experimentation were the best ways to improve your abilities. But sometimes, it was really nice to not have to overthink things and just have the solution fall into your lap. Extending the field was like that. Having done it once by mistake, I was now able to do it again. It wasn’t like pushing on the field to turn it on or pulling on it to turn it off. Expanding it felt more like taking a breath and expanding my lungs. I practiced expanding and contracting the field and I spend some time turning the field on while it was expanded. Whatever was inside the field when I turned it on went into R1 with me, just like normal, except that now I could take my entire bed with me at once if I wanted to. No more enveloping only one thing at a time. What a time saver!

Another nice bonus was that if something wasn’t totally enveloped by the field, then it didn’t go into R1 with me. That was good, because I didn’t want to have to explain to dad why I only had half my bed or only a bit of my lamp. I did some experimenting to see if I could further extend a portion of the field to include objects that were only partially inside the field. It wasn’t easy, but I found that I could do it by holding the expanded field and following that up by using a very similar technique to the one I used when I send out a field to encompass something. The difference here was that I wasn’t creating another field, but rather I was pushing out a portion of the existing field and encompassing the object.

For the next hour I practiced sending out the field to different distances from my body. A foot away was easy to do, but I felt a lot of strain at two feet and I could barely hold the field out to two and a half feet. I suppose that it had something to do with the volume inside the field, but I didn’t have the math or the patience to figure it out. Instead, I worked on placing the field at different distances from my body that were easier to handle and making sure that I could do it quickly and without much thought. I’d get to increasing the distances over time.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Despite almost outing myself to Uncle Magnum, it was a great night. I’d had an epic battle and I’d discovered another feature of the field. I was extremely tired and ready to call it a night as I walked into the bathroom to get ready for bed. I looked in the mirror and I saw that I wasn’t there. Oh man, I really was tired. I’d forgotten to turn off the field. I’d left it expanded about three inches from my body and I was about to turn it off and draw it in when I noticed something strange. I had two fields surrounding me. One was three inches from my body and the other was against my skin. Had the two fields been on all this time and I hadn’t noticed?

I left the bathroom, turned off the field and contracted it to my body again. Then I expanded it to be around one foot from my body. I did have two fields around me. The one around my body never moved; it merely send out a second field to surround me. Just like I could make another field to surround an object and bring it into R1, I could send out another field around me. I wonder what would happen if I had two fields around me and I turned only one on or I turned them both on. I tried it right away and found out that if the outer one was on and the inner one wasn’t, then I went into R1 and so did everything inside of the outer field. If the inner one was on and the outer one wasn’t, I still went into R1, but nothing else in the outer field did. I couldn’t turn on both fields at once, though. I don’t know if I was a matter of not being strong enough to do it or if it couldn’t be done.

The extended field was perfect for the protective field that I had in mind, but I’d need to be strong enough to hold it much farther from my body before I was ready to try it out. For now, it was time to go to sleep.