He spent five minutes lying flat on the ground with his vision tunneling and all sorts of shooting lights flickering around in his mental vision. He did manage not to faint. His breathing, which was again threatening hyperventilation, finally calmed down, and the light-headedness faded somewhat. He lifted himself up and found he could sit. All right! He looked around carefully, but no one seemed to be about. Standing up very carefully, leaning on the hood of the truck, he checked around once more, but then he felt so lightheaded he waited a bit longer to make sure he didn’t faint. He grabbed the cooler box in the back and pulled out one of the beers he had tucked away in there. A few swigs from the can, and he felt much better!

Everything was still quiet, so he sat on the same rock he had sat on earlier and finished the beer. When he felt ready to try again, he studied the hill and focused on a spot maybe three hundred yards away. And he moved there instantly. Woo hoo. He grinned even as his head spun again, but then, as it settled, he quickly looked around at the few houses relatively nearby. Nothing, Oh, no, wait. There was a woman in the yard of that house looking up here. Okay. Time to go. No need to get any official attention. He refrained from teleporting and simply wandered over to where the rod was, retrieved that, and then sauntered back down the hillside to the truck. It took a bit of maneuvering to get the truck turned around on the narrow track, but eventually, he had it facing downhill, and then he headed home, mentally exhausted but jubilant.

Over the next few days, he surreptitiously worked on developing a range of spells to move things. He noticed that as he practiced, the ease of making the spell increased to the point where it was like his mind subconsciously triggered the spell without him being required to parse it out. The more he practiced the same spell over and over, the easier it became to the point where it was like all he had to do was think of a particular spell, and it would happen. He kept studying any Minoan tablets that were available on the internet, and his vocabulary kept growing, albeit slowly, but mostly in ways that were not a lot of use. He now knew the words for various household items and even some plants aside from the frequently mentioned food crops, but the general vocabulary was still very limited. He worked out a spell to apply kinetic force to an area but lacked the Minoan words for kinetic energy. He tried various combinations of words, but he simply lacked the right terms and the appropriate ordinary connecting words that the tablets simply hadn’t provided. After all, they were not conversation pieces, merely accounts of things for calculating tax, most likely. It was annoyingly frustrating, that was for sure! He got to the end of his tether one day, and in sheer frustration, he formulated the spell in his head with the appropriate English words for the action he wanted to accomplish in the places where he had never found the right Minoan words. Hmm. He repeated the spell in his head several times and then looked at a Coke can sitting on the workbench in the garage.  He said the spell with force, and the coke can promptly flew across the room and hit the garage door quite hard. Whoa! He trotted over, and the can was badly dented, although fortunately, there was no matching dent in the garage door, as the can had luckily hit one of the crossbeams that reinforced the panels. Jeez. Then it dawned on him what he’d done! Alright! He could mix in English words, which would give him the flexibility to do the things he wanted!