The first feat of psychokinesis I’d ever witnessed had been a case of levitation: Merritt Elbock levitating a plastic water cup into arm’s reach.

That happened four days ago, but, Angel, it felt like another lifetime altogether.

My first attempt at levitation was rather naïve. I figured that making objects float would be as simple as taking the recipe for moving objects and pointing it upward, rather than sideways. To that end, I built a plexus in the form of a yard-tall column of psychokinetic threads centered around the chair. As I let the power flow, the chair was lifted skyward atop a glistening waterspout of metallic light. The plexus carried the chair up to where its threads frayed at the top of the column. Once there, the chair bobbed in place like a rubber duck in a tub.

Andalon watched all of this with rapt excitement, seated atop a nearby table.

Then I tried moving the floating chair left and right, and Andalon’s amazement turned to delighted giggles as things fell apart.

I did what felt natural, willing the plexus column to the side, and I’d expected the chair to move along with the column.

It didn’t.

Instead, it was like I’d pulled the magic rug out from underneath the chair. It fell to the ground with a loud thud that made me flinch.

“Guh,” I groaned.

“Try again,” Andalon chanted. “Try again!”

And I did. I tried making the column wider, and moving the plexus more slowly. This did not help. It didn’t matter whether I moved the plexus quickly or at a snail’s pace: whenever the plexus moved out from underneath the chair, the chair did not follow along with it.

“Hmm…” I pursed my lips in concentration.

Then it hit me. I raised a clenched fist in epiphany. “Wait! Why didn’t I see it before? The plexus column makes the chair go up, and only up. You can’t use an up-plexus to move the chair to the left or right.”

“Can you make a left-or-right plessus?” Andalon asked.

I nodded. “That’s exactly what I was thinking!”

Again, it was like one of those racing games with stretches of track with little arrows that accelerated the vehicles passing over them. The vehicle moved only because the track was already there, ready to accelerate it in that particular direction.

I took a deep breath, and then made my next column—but I didn’t stop there. As soon as the chair rose, I lifted the plexus off the ground, changing the direction it exerted its force. I stretched it out like a luminous bubble-tube, oriented horizontally. And it worked exactly as I thought it would, whisking the chair along and that delighted Andalon because it took all of three seconds for me to realize that I’d bitten off far more than I could chew.

Andalon giggled as I screamed.

The instant I turned the plexus’ upper part to the side to guide the chair to the left, I realized I had to keep moving the plexus in order to keep up with the chair. Otherwise, physics would have its way with the chair the instant it left the plexus’ area of effect. This wasn’t the track coming before the cart, it was the track racing after the cart, looping and dashing and swooping and lashing in a desperate chase to keep it from—

—The chair flew out of my control, slamming through one of the garden’s glass walls as it catapulted across the chasm to the window of an office building on the opposite side of the street. My shoulders shot up so high, I was worried they’d pinch my head off my neck.

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Mercifully, I didn’t hear anyone scream, though the office building’s security alarm started blaring.

My heart sank as my guilt rose.

“Beast’s teeth,” I muttered.

Two chairs in under an hour. That’s gotta be some kind of record.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Genneth?”

I sighed. “I think we’re going to need physics.”

Andalon furrowed her brow in concern. “Fizz is sick?”

I smiled—moaning quietly, but still, I smiled. “If only it was that easy,” I muttered.

For the record, I used to be good at math, once upon a time. Under Mrs. Frog’s guidance, geometry class became the highlight of my high school schedule. I adored the picture proofs. Parallel lines, side-angle-side, circumcircle, circumscribe—it was great. Algebra 2 was okay, Precalculus was tough, but, Calculus? The only reason I made it through Calculus was because I’d gone and sworn on my dead sister’s grave not to let her down by flunking it. So, having barely made it through Calculus in one piece, imagine my horror when, on the first day of college physics class, the professor started talking about “configuration spaces” and “action functionals”. I’d known then and there that I was doomed—maybe not as much doom as I was currently under, but still, it was bad.

I tapped my foot as I thought. Then it hit me.

“Friction!”

Andalon tilted her head. “Andalon does not know.”

For once, I did not blame her.

“Friction happens when surfaces rub against each other,” I explained, rubbing my gloved hands together to demonstrate. “Friction keeps objects from moving, at least so long as the force that’s trying to move the objects isn’t too strong.” I paused. “Huh…”

That actually gave me an idea.

Taking a deep breath, I pointed my hands in front of me and conjured a plexus levitation column, just like the one with the chair, except this one only came up to the middle of my torso.

Then, carefully, I pressed my hand down onto it.

“Whoa…”

It was… squishy. It was force without texture; solidness without the solid. The weirdest part was that, with some effort, I could push my hand further into the plexus. It was like fighting to get two magnets to touch one another, except it was my hand and the plexus instead of two north poles. Leaning onto it made me fall—and I yelped as I fell—and I would have landed on my face if I hadn’t grabbed onto a nearby chair at the last second.

The plexus dissipated along with my concentration.

“It can support the chair’s weight but not mine?” I mumbled, dusting myself off.

“You’re bigger than Mr. Chair, Mr. Genneth.”

I nodded. “That’s right…”

Shaking out my shoulders, I decided to try again. I made a new plexus column on the ground in front of me. This time, I thickened the light-threads and increased their number, much like I had with the first chair I’d launched into the sky. I dialed back the power a bit, just to be safe. I didn’t want to end up like the chairs.

This time, when my hand touched the top of the plexus, it rose off the forcefield, as if being pushed away.

“No.” I shook my head. “Not as if. That’s exactly what’s happening.”

The reason my hand—and, later, my body—had sunken into the previous column was because the upward force had been less than my weight. The plexus couldn’t bear the load.

Next, I pushed down on the plexus, lifting my feet off the ground in the process, like I’d stepped up the first rung of a ladder. I hopped back to the ground by pushing off the top of the plexus with my hand.

I dismissed the plexus with a puff of air from my face, and then smiled broadly.

“What is it?” Andalon asked.

“I wanna try something.”

I made a short, stout plexus column—maybe four inches tall at most—one wide enough to give me plenty of standing room. The same perfect wyrm memory ability that let me relive my past Calculus trauma also made it a cinch to recreate one of my previous attempts at spellcasting. So I did; I gave the plexus the exact same amount of upward force as the one before it, and then I set a single foot down on top of it.

It was like standing on a sea of gelatin. Angry gelatin. My foot bobbed up and down under the influence of the psychokinetic forces. Very carefully, I decreased the density and thickness of the plexus’ threads. The imaginary surface beneath my foot became more and more solid—less… bouncy—until, I reached a sweet spot where, to my astonishment, the darn thing felt like believably solid ground

I bit my lip as I stepped onto it all the way. Both feet.

My legs trembled, and I had my arms stuck out to my sides like I was a man pretending to be a bird—only I didn’t need to pretend.

I was floating!

“Flipping fudge! Andalon, look at me! I’m floating!”

And to think, some people say four inches isn’t impressive!

Andalon applauded me. “Wow!”

“If I can move it,” I said, “I can make my own hover-board!”

Eagerness and excited, I did just that, and then immediately toppled to the floor as the plexus slid out from beneath me, landing me right on my tail.