Crown Vic to a Parallel World

21

The Magic Box

Room 604 was much the same as we’d left it the day before.  Some minor changes included the removal of all the weapons in the cases and the stainless clean-up of my blood from the padded floor.  “I’m glad they took them out,” Bem commented in reference to the weapons, “never should have been there in the first place.”  I nodded my agreement.  Bem would get no argument from me.

Our gun cases sat just inside the door, where we’d left them on the way to lunch.  We removed our shoes and walked onto the padded floor of the sparring room.  Bem glanced up at the burned-out catalyst in the ceiling and shook his head like he was reliving his amazement from the day before.  He started conversation with me.  “How’s the magic going?  You learn any control?”

I’d actually forgotten all about practicing.  Between reconciling with Shawn and our marathon sex session, magic had taken a back seat.  I hedged my answer.  “Some.  Needs more work.”

Bem didn’t react to my partial truth.  He shifted to Shawn.  “Any thoughts on weaponizing your power?”

Obstinance rose in Shawn, and he didn’t bother to hide it.  “No.” He spat the word out like it was something he’d found caught between his teeth.

Bem’s left hand rose to knead his right shoulder, his right hand found its way into his pants pocket.  “Here’s the way it is, guys.  We’ve got a month, and whatever we are at the end of that month, that’s what is going to try to save the world.  It’s not enough time to make you soldiers, but I don’t need soldiers.  You both need to be able to defend yourselves and use whatever skills you have to the best of your ability.”

Bem turned his attention to me as he went on.  “Church, they tell me that your magic is what will save us.  I want you practicing ALL THE TIME.  Even when you and Shawn are banging it out, get creative.  See if you can,” he shook an almost closed fist back and forth in a gesture to represent male masturbation, “while you,” he thrust his hips forward and back in another gesture to represent fucking, “you get the idea.”

Shawn blanched at the suggestion.  “I’m not letting his power anywhere near my…my sensitive bits.”

The conversation struck me as odd.  It seemed strange that in a world where one can walk down the street and get propositioned or turn on the television and watch an orgy on every channel, sentences like, ‘stroke him with your magic while you pound him,’ seemed taboo.  I also thought it interesting that Bem assumed I was always the top.  I guessed it was the cliché about the bigger guy always being the top, but I wondered if that was a cliché on Solum like it was on Earth.

Bem didn’t make any more suggestions, but he did set a goal.  “It’s Monday, by Wednesday I better be impressed.  Go out in the observation room and do something, even if it’s wrong.”

I felt like a first-year apprentice who just had a broom shoved into his hands.  I was ashamed that I’d lost sight of the goal, that I’d lost a whole day without activating my power even once.  Beyond my shame, I still felt confused.  Everyone was pushing the idea that my magic was somehow going to save the world.  I supposed I had enough of the stuff, but what they expected me to do with it was beyond me.

I took myself toward the glass door.  On the way, I heard Bem telling Shawn he was going to test Shawn’s self-defense prowess.  I figured Shawn had a better chance of landing a hit on the hopping sparrow than I did and mentally wished him luck.

I wanted to watch the match, but knew if I did, I wouldn’t do anything else.  I needed to get to work, so I set my mind to my assigned task and scanned the room for objects to play with.  The neat row of shoes lined against the glass wall seemed likely candidates.  I concentrated on one of my orange heels and called it to me.  It came easily enough and hovered in front of my face.  I poked it with my finger and felt the pressure through my power.  The feeling was like pressing one palm against the other.  “Weird.” I said to the orange heel.

I didn’t look at the second heel.  I pictured it in my head and called it over.  It came eagerly to hover next to its brother.  I poked them both at the same time and felt the pressure in my mind like I had two imaginary hands.  I knocked the heels together and felt the opposite pressure in each facet of my power like the hold I had on the heels was a physical thing.

The act of keeping two objects in the air didn’t seem to take much more concentration than one.  In fact, adding the second object seemed to halve the amount of concentration I needed for each.  I pictured the light green heels that Shawn had been wearing and called them both to me.  They arrived as a unit.  My power held them as a pair, not individually.  It was a strange distinction between holding my heels separately and Shawn’s together.  I split my hold on his heels and had them hover next to mine.

I looked at the pairs of shoes hovering in the air and puzzled over the mechanism that was keeping them there.  “What’s supporting them?” I said to the room. “I feel them.  I can feel myself holding them but what actually holds them?”

I grabbed one of Shawn’s heels and pulled it out of the air.  I held the shoe in my hands and explored it with my fingers.  My fingers didn’t tell me anything about the shoe that my magic didn’t already know.  I felt the texture of the flexible upper part of the shoe with its smooth finish and the ribbed sole that was still flexible to make heel / toe walking comfortable but not as pliant as the upper.

I looked inside the shoe and stuffed my hand in it to feel the inside.  I also reached into the hovering shoe with my magic to see if the inside would feel the same for my magic as it did for my hand.  They both felt the same except my magic could get deeper into the shoe than my hand could because my magic had no shape.  It took the shape of whatever it encountered.

“Like water.” I said aloud.  I tried to equate my magic with water in my mind, but the analogy wouldn’t gel. “It’s not like water…not quite.  Water can’t hold things, not liquid water anyway.”

I looked at the shoe that my hand was stuck inside and wiggled my fingers against the inside of the toe.  I saw the upper material flex as my fingers pushed it outward.  I looked at the hovering shoe and tried to do the same thing with my magic.  The material flexed outward like there were fingers inside the shoe. “Fuck me.” I said to myself. “It can fill the shoe like water, but it can hold a shape like ice.  Whatever that stuff is, it’s physical…physical energy.  Wild.”

I reasoned that when I held an object within my magic, the physical energy flowed around the object like liquid water would and that’s why I could feel the whole object all at once.  When I wanted to move the object, the magic solidified like ice, to support whatever it held.  I reasoned that my exercises with the rock hadn’t enlightened me that I could apply force with the magic because the rock was so hard.  If I’d practiced with something softer, like a tennis ball, I might have better understood the forces that I could apply with my solidified magic.

I attempted an experiment.  I tried to see if I could make a piece of physical energy appear without holding an object.  I pictured a flat panel of magic and let it hover in front of me like a floating picture frame.  When I thought I had it, I reached a finger out to see if it was really there.  My finger flattened against the energy, and I felt it not only in my finger, but in my magic as well. “Cool.” I commented to the air.

I played around with the floating wedge heels and the panel of magic.  I had the heels kick against it and step on it.  I imagined a much larger panel and made the shoes heel / toe march upon it.  My heels and Shawn’s heels marched in rhythm next to each other, the shoes flexing like they were marching against a solid floor.  I felt everything they did from the perspective of the shoes and from the perspective of the magic panel.  The experience was super interesting from a sensory perspective, and I wondered how many objects I could control, both real and imaginary.

As an experiment, I tried adding Bem’s boots to the parade.  I thought about his plain, black military issue boots and tried to get them to join the other shoes.  They refused to come.  I guessed it was because I hadn’t noticed them in enough detail to picture them accurately.  I glanced to where they stood on the floor and called them to me.  As soon as I put eyes on them, Bem’s boots came to join the other marching shoes as eagerly as could be.

Soon, I had three pairs of shoes marching in place on my invisible floor.  I fooled around, made them march in different directions and at different rates.  When I got bored with that, I sent my three pairs of shoes on tour around the room.

I had them walk up the walls and across the light panel ceiling.  I deliberately forced their steps out of sync with each other to see if I had the concentration to maintain three different rhythms.  I found that it took a fair amount of concentration to get the different rhythms ‘set up,’ but once I had them going, they were easy to maintain.

When I thought that I was doing pretty well with my marching shoes, I tried to add some more complexity to challenge myself.  “Can I keep it up without looking?” I asked me aloud.  I concentrated on the feedback I was receiving from each individual pair of shoes and shut my eyes.  The marching shoes maintained course and speed.

With that hurdle cleared, I decided to see if I could keep the shoes marching when I was distracted.  I turned myself toward the glass to face away from the marching heels and opened my eyes.  The shoes continued to march while I watched the second half of the sparring match between Bem and Shawn.

Bem was working Shawn hard, much harder than he’d tried to work me.  The lean, lewd, honey-blond man moved like lighting.  His fists and feet were barely visible as he attacked Shawn.  Shawn did a great job keeping up.  He took the occasional hit, but he fended off many more than he took.  I figured that the self-defense-training he’d been through must have been intense.

The battle pitched back and forth with Bem maintaining relentless pressure on Shawn and Shawn blocking for all he was worth.  It took me a minute to realize that Shawn never attacked, he just defended.  That surprised me at first, but then I thought about what I’d learned about Shawn in the short time I’d known him.  The idea of never causing harm fit him perfectly.  He would defend himself all day, but he would never fight back.  He would never raise a hand in anger against another person.

When I realized the type of battle I was watching, I got worried.  The trouble with never attacking, is that any battle you fight, eventually it becomes a fight of attrition.  Whoever runs out of gas last, wins.  Shawn was young and in great shape, so I assumed he could go all day, but if his opponent had the same staying power, eventually the attacker would get the upper hand.  I doubted Shawn considered that.

Bem hopped around, trying to break through Shawn’s nearly flawless defenses.  He bounced and feinted and jabbed.  The two opponents circled each other while they fought, working their way across the floor like dancers.  As graceful as Shawn was, he could have been dancing.  Bem was all sharp movements; jab, jab, jab.  Shawn was fluid, his every movement poetry.

I felt myself getting distracted as I watched Shawn fight, and I knew that my distraction would eventually be Shawn’s distraction.  I tried to divert my attention by finding something else to focus on, but I struggled to tear myself away from the fight.  As I struggled, the fighters moved around until Bem’s back was to me.

His position gave me an irresistible idea.  I opened the glass door with magic and marched the shoes into the dojo room without following them.  I floated one behind Bem’s head, two behind his knees, hovered my pair off to the side, and moved one behind his ass.

If Shawn noticed what I was doing, he didn’t let on, but given the intense focus he had on Bem’s moves, it was very possible he didn’t notice.  I finished setting my trap and sprang it.  I clapped the soles of my heels together with a loud smack that drew Bem’s attention, then I booted his ass with one of his own boots.

Bem reacted and tried to do too many things at once.  He jerked toward the noise, then felt the kick and jerked harder.  As he turned, he noticed the shoe behind his head in his peripheral vision and tried to swing at it.  He also tried to get his body around to defend but the shoes behind his knees stopped the lower half of his body from turning with the rest of it.

He stumbled and started to fall.  I didn’t want Bem to hurt himself, especially at the expense of my silly joke.  I wanted to keep Bem from falling and reacted with little thought.  I imagined a big panel of my power like a large blanket held taught between two people and held it behind Bem to catch him.  He fell into the magic like a sack of potatoes.  I lifted him with the magic blanket and set him back on his feet.  I also marched the shoes out of the dojo room and into a neat row on my side of the glass.

“I finally figured out how to kick your ass.” I called into the room through the door that I still held open with magic.

“What did you do?” Bem asked.  He seemed to have forgotten all about his sparring match with Shawn.  He looked at me with what could only be described as Christmas morning wonder emblazoned on his face. “That last thing when you stopped me from falling, what was that?”

I stepped forward and leaned my shoulder on the glass door jamb.  “I didn’t want to catch you directly with my magic because I’m not that comfortable with it yet.  I was afraid I’d hurt you.”

“So, what was that?” Bem demanded through his excitement. “Do it again.  Right here.” Bem made a square in the air with his hands. “Set-up that barrier or whatever.”

I did as he asked and announced when the panel of magic was stable.  I’d set it up just like the blanket that I’d used to catch him in.  Bem pressed his hands into the invisible blanket.  I felt them push into my magic.  He leaned his weight against it like he was doing a standing pushup and kneaded it several times like he was trying to gauge its durability.  “Can you make it harder?” He asked.

I imagined the magic like a sheet of plywood instead of a blanket.  Bem poked and prodded some more, even punched it a few times.  Shawn came to see what the fuss was about.  He went around the back side of the magic and tried to touch Bem through it.  He met the same resistance.  “Softer.” Bem ordered.

I pictured something like cellophane plastic.  Bem pressed his hands into the magic.  I felt it stretch around his fingers.  Shawn moved next to him and did the same.  “What is it?” Shawn asked.

“I don’t know.” I said and went to join them.  I tried to touch the magic to see for myself, but it seemed to almost retreat from my touch.  The little I could feel put me in mind of a sheet of roofing rubber.  “It’s whatever the stuff is I use to move things around.  Instead of moving objects, I gathered the stuff together and made whatever this is.”

Bem gave me some more orders.  He waved his hands around with the palms down like he was instructing me to polish the floor. “Make the second one again, the firm one, but do it just above the floor…parallel.”

I pictured a sheet of plywood three inches off the padded floor.  Bem stepped onto it, gingerly, like a cat on an unfamiliar surface.  My magic held firm and I could feel the soles of Bem’s feet through my power.  He waved Shawn onto the platform.  Shawn stepped onto it and he and Bem walked around.  They explored the panel and felt for the edge of the magic with their shoeless feet.

Bem was fascinated.  I didn’t understand the big deal.  He waved me to step on it.  I put one foot on and tried to step up, but I couldn’t.  The magic settled to the ground and dissipated under my foot.  I stepped off and Shawn and Bem rose back up.

I rubbed my neck.  “I guess I can’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps.  Weird.”

“Can you move it?” Bem asked.

I floated the platform and its passengers around the room and back again.  Bem jumped, stepped off, and stepped back on.  “How much effort is this costing you?”  He tapped his foot on the magic.  It made no sound.

I shrugged.  “None really.  It’s like a handful of change.  I know I’m carrying it, but it doesn’t take any more effort than keeping my hand closed.”

“What’s change?”  Bem asked.  He immediately shook his head and waved his right hand in the air to dismiss his question.  “Never mind, I don’t care what ‘change’ is.  I assume it’s very light.” He seemed to have an idea and pointed to the door. “Take us back to the range.  Stop and pick up the weapons cases and shoes.  See if you can take us all the way there without setting us down or physically touching anything.”

I did as I was told.  We almost had a ‘Three Stooges’ moment when I tried to get the platform through the glass door.  The magic was too wide to fit, and it bumped the door jamb, almost tossing its passengers onto the floor as it did.  They kept their balance and waited while I narrowed the magic and tried again.  The second time, it went through easily.

I used my magic to pick up the gun cases and shoes and load them onto what I started thinking of as my magic flat cart.  I mentally pushed it out the door, down the hall, into the elevator, out of the elevator, down another hall, and into the gun range.  I set everyone and everything down and released the magic.

Bem took my revolver from its case and loaded it.  “If we’re going to test it, may as well test it.” He said while he counted eight rounds into the cylinder.  He snapped it home and pointed down the range.  “Set a barrier at ten yards, just in front of the targets.  Make it as solid as you can.”

I did as I was told.  I thought of a big sheet of plate steel.  Bem leveled the gun down range, aimed, and fired.  The gun roared, the bullet hit the magic, and ricocheted.  The high-powered slug bounced around the range.  Bem dropped flat to the ground.  Shawn and I were quick to follow his example.

The slug pinged around the range but didn’t make it back over the firing line.  When the noise stopped, we waited another minute, then got up and dusted ourselves off.  “That was careless.  I apologize.  I know better than to fire a high-powered round at a solid object.” Bem said in a sour voice full of self-chastisement.

I was glad he’d admitted his mistake.  The episode had scared the shit out of me and Shawn.  I was getting ready to chew Bem’s head off when he beat me to it.  I waited for my rebuilt heart to work off the adrenalin coursing through my system and checked on Shawn to make sure he was OK.  He was scared like I was scared, but that’s all.  Bem seemed to take the situation in stride.  He carefully smoothed his rumpled clothes before he made another suggestion. “Church, can you make it like a set of heavy drapes that’s bullet-proof?”

“Bullet-proof drapes.” I parroted. “Sure.”  I concentrated down range and pictured something like a Kevlar theater curtain.

Shawn and I crouched down while Bem fired another round.  It hit the invisible curtain and didn’t come back at us.  I felt the impact through my magic.  I felt the round hit the curtain and flatten out, losing its energy as it expanded.  The impact was intense, but it didn’t hurt me.  I felt it, but I felt it indirectly.

Bem fired the remaining six rounds, and we all crossed the firing line to see what happened to the slugs.  Bem ran his hands along the curtain I’d made and nodded approval at it.  He bent down and picked up several of the seven dark grey discs that littered the floor.  All were vaguely round and flattened to varying degrees.  Bem tossed one to me, one to Shawn, and kept one to examine.

“This is what makes these rounds effective.” Bem explained. “Get hit in the chest with one of these and you’ll have a barely noticeable hole in front, but your back will look like a salad bowl made of gore.”

Shawn visibly recoiled at the idea but didn’t say anything.  I appreciated the benefits of stopping power but hated the idea at the same time.  “Well, Church, it looks like you can protect us from fire.” Bem pawed at the curtain again, fascinated by what he couldn’t see. “And you could keep that up all day, couldn’t you?”

I had to come up with a comparison that I thought Bem would understand.  “It’s kind of like driving in light traffic.  I have to pay attention, but not too much.”

Bem leaned his back against the curtain.  His hand kneaded his shoulder while he thought.  Something clicked in his head, and he pushed off.  “Make another platform.” He pointed to the floor.  I released the curtain and made the platform.  He stepped onto it and pulled Shawn up as well.

“See if you can add walls.”

One side at a time, I added four walls about a foot taller than Shawn and Bem stood.  Bem felt each of them as I added them.  I almost laughed at his unintentional mime impression.

“Now a roof.” He directed.

I added a flat roof.  As soon as it was in place, something changed.  I couldn’t feel Shawn anymore.  His surprised face looked through the magic and his mouth said something I couldn’t hear.  He was clearly speaking, but no sound got through the box.  I took one of the walls down and our connection re-established.  “Did you feel that?” He asked.

I admitted that I had. “Yeah, it was weird.”

“What was weird?” Bem asked.  Shawn explained.  That gave Bem something else to chew over.

The last test Bem requested was for me to shoot a blast of white magic at a target protected by my barrier.  The barrier stopped the white magic just like it had our connection and Shawn’s speech.  “It’s odd that it stops your magic.” Bem observed. “I wonder why.”

We stood in a row looking down-range at the target.  The only sound was a metallic click as Bem advanced the cylinder of my revolver one chamber at a time with his thumb.

I offered a suggestion. “Walls don’t discriminate.”

“They don’t, do they?”  Bem said like he was reasoning that out as he spoke the words.  I half-expected him to ‘harrumph,’ but he didn’t.  He seemed pleased and a little overwhelmed.

As for me, I was getting hungry again and guessed if it wasn’t five, it was damn near.  I asked Shawn for the time and made sure I did it with deliberate volume.  I was right, it was five-after-five.  Bem paused his musings to confirm that he’d heard me.  “I can take a hint.  Go ahead, school is out for the day.  Good job, see you tomorrow.”