Testing complete.

Mitch had gone to a nearby gym and had a personal trainer walk him through some basic exercises that could help him establish a reasonable idea of what he was capable of at the moment. He planned to do no physical training at all and redo the tests only after trying something to increase his energy capacity. If there were to be a statistically significant increase in his metrics, he would know the method was having an effect. Although with a sample size of one, determining what would be considered statistically significant would be a bit problematic.

Anyway, he now had his baseline measurements. Time for some experiments.

He purchased a stack of thin two-feet by two-feet wooden boards and a couple trays of some kind of sprout from Home Warehouse and laid them out all over his place. On each, he varied some aspect of the formation he had used before. He knew that setup was effective at gathering the surrounding energies. The problem was that it was too good at its job and created a deadly density of the energies within its structure. He placed one of the sprouts in the center of each.

He set up about twenty different miniature version of the formation and sat back to observe the results. After about an hour several of the variants developed a hemisphere of thick mist within them that was almost entirely opaque. The plants within them glowed before disintegrating. These he carried with the utmost caution to his window and promptly tossed out into the alleyway. Despite his checking for pedestrians below, one stray cat got a hearty dose of mist and glowed brightly before vanishing.

After another hour a few more had begun forming a mist at their center. Two more of the plants disincorporated. Repeat window toss. At this point, there were twelve boards remaining.

After the next hour, several plants, while they had not been atomized, were wilting and it became quite apparent that they were in their final throes. The majority of the others were just sitting there, mostly unaffected. But there was one. One trial had a plant that had not only measurably, but visibly, increased in size. The plant was a vibrant green. Any greener and it would be unnatural. There was a haze within the circle, but just barely. He had a winner. Time for animal trials.

Yes, killing animals is wrong. In his entirely unbiased opinion, killing Mitch was much worse. He went and bought some white feeder rats.

***

He now had twelve rats. He had made a full-size formation based on the one successful test model, taken a picture of the formation, and placed a single rat in one of those temporary cardboard cages in the center of the circle. Very shortly after completing the formation the rat vanished.

"Shit!"

***

3 days and multiple trips to get more rats later and still no success. Mitch was down to his last four rats again. He really didn't want to go buy rats again. The employees at the closest store had started looking at him strangely.

So far only one rat hadn't been eaten by the white glow. That rat had melted. Don't ask him how it happened, he can't tell you. The damn thing had started freaking out about twenty minutes after he activated the formation and just dissolved. By the time he had been able to safely enter the circle and retrieve the cage the rat soup had soaked through the cardboard and was oozing out onto the floor. Somehow, despite being only a couple of hours old, it smelled like meat that had been rotting for a week. He had avoided vomiting by the most minute of margins.

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He had learned that both absolute and relative size mattered. A larger formation gathered more energy more quickly. Pretty simple. But, the size of each element in relation to the others also had an effect. A circle just big enough for him to sit in, and with the lines leading to the elemental embodiments twenty feet long, the formation would become deadly almost immediately. Conversely, if he had the same size circle and lines six inches long, almost nothing would happen. However, if he made the lines themselves short and the crescents at their ends massive it would have the same effect as making the lines extremely long.

The current version seemed to be another failure. This one seemed to be ineffective. The hour was almost up, and the rat was still snuffling about in its travel box unharmed. That extremely light haze from the successful test model had not formed. In short, bupkiss.

He decided to spend the last few minutes of the hour in the bedroom where he had moved the successful experiment to try to find the differences. He had left the formation active, and his sprout was still growing remarkably fast, but the most interesting thing to him currently was that the plant had started to grow in such as manner so as to keep itself within the central portion of the formation. When the tip of the plant had reached the end of the hemisphere where the haze was visible, it had bent to one side and begun following the bubble of mist's contours with no regard given to the sun's position. It seemed the vapor in that bubble was more nourishing to the plant than sunlight.

The alarm he had set went off. He had spent his time marveling at the plant rather than evaluating the formation. Oh well, it was time to call it a day anyhow. He went and grabbed his broom and dustpan and headed back to the main room where he stopped in his tracks. The circle had a haze. He wouldn't have noticed it except that the light had caught it at the right angle and made it appear slightly iridescent.

He tried to keep calm, but it was difficult. He walked briskly over to the formation and was about to break the circle with the brooms handle when he stopped. He should wait another hour to make sure the density didn't continue to increase. The goal here was equilibrium. The formation should be increasing the overall energy level in the circle, but when it reached that level, it should maintain it rather than continuing to just pump more and more energy in like his first formation had.

So he waited some more.

***

The hour was over. He hadn't been able to take the tension and had gone to stream a show on his bedroom tv, but now he headed back into the other room. The sun had almost set, but there was still enough light to just barely show that beautiful iridescence. Success! True and actual success.

He excitedly broke the circle and allowed the mist to clear before grabbing the rat. He shook the box slightly and heard the rat scrabble around inside. Still alive!

He took it back to the big cage he was using to hold the other three. When he dumped it out of the box, he got another surprise. The rat was black. All the rats he had bought were white, including this one. But, now it was black. Actually, it looked more like a really dark blue if you paid attention to it. The other rats all shrank away from the blue one who immediately headed to the food and water in one corner and began to chow down.

Mitch watched it for a minute more before deciding that he would check it in the morning to see if there were any adverse effects. He went back to the circle and began to take measurements.

The formation he had arrived at was about six feet across, with the same wavy lines connected to crescents as before transiting the path of the circle, but the lines were shorter and thicker while the crescents were wider. In between each of these was another wavy line crossing the circle which began inside rather than outside of the circle and ran much further than the crescents away from the circle. These intermediate lines were thicker inside the circle and narrowed to a point. Almost like an old-school drawing of a sunburst. These were meant to pull the energy away from inside the circle if it got too dense. The amount they pulled out seemed to be connected to how thick they were so the ratios had to be right.

If the rat were to still be healthy in the morning, he would try the formation on himself.