Sorry people. I went on holidays and forgot to update this while I was away. Double length does today to make up for it.

He looked up the web page she had sent him a link for where he could get some idea of what was involved and the costs of taking part. Right, so there was accommodation available at this hotel or that hotel while travel to and from the dig was included and all up it came to four and half thousand pounds. How much was that in dollars? Right. Plus, food and spending money. Airfares. Man! And in return, as a mere assistant, he would get to lug dirt and rubble away from the site! Ha! Alright, he had to admit it could be interesting to be on a real dig. But the cost! He sent back a reply that indicated he was interested but had to work out how to finance the trip, which gave him an out if he decided not to go. He told her he’d get back to her in a couple of weeks as he would have to talk to his folks about the money, and his dad was going interstate on work for a few days.

He went back to fiddling with magic ideas. Stopping bullets would be handy. But how. His dad owned an old Winchester that he never used anymore, which Jason decided he’d borrow to test his ideas. If he managed to come up with any, that was. Right. Down to brass tacks. So how far could he teleport or translocate, which he thought was a more accurate description of what he was doing. He would always associate Star Trek with the word teleport, breaking down the person or object and re-assembling it somewhere else. As far as he could determine, what Urasmian’s travel spell did was simply change the object’s location, and it could apparently do so across multiple universes! The limit seemed to be that the location had to be known.

What else? He could move objects with like kinetic energy or something. That was what he was doing with the roulette balls. Could he create some type of magic forcefield that would stop things? He spent the next three days trying various things before coming up with something that seemed to create a solid wall of force that was strong enough to stop things he threw at it. He had to limit his practice till after mum and dad had gone to work each day. His dad was back to working at a local site for the moment, and he was taking the truck to work, which made things difficult. Right. But his dad was going interstate shortly, which would mean he could take the truck and head out into the mountains and find a quiet spot away from everyone where he could see what a bullet would do.

His dad left on Monday, so he planned to head out Tuesday. The sky was overcast, with the occasional darker cloud producing about of drizzle to dampen things down as he left the house. It was the sort of light rain that would create slippery conditions on the roads without actually washing the muck off, so he made sure to drive carefully. He worked his way out of suburbia and drove up into the hills beyond Jamul. He had studied the area on Google Maps and found what he thought looked to be the ideal spot for his experiments. He had spotted a track that turned off a secondary road and then wandered along a small ravine that twisted and turned. It had to be some sort of access track for forestry people or maybe the local park rangers, as it led nowhere that he could see. Hopefully, the sound of the gunshots would be muffled by the terrain, and he would not attract any undue attention! There were no houses in the immediate area, and once there, he could see the track was probably only used very rarely as the few vehicle tire marks were very faint.

The track and the ravine appeared perfect for what he had in mind, he decided, as he drove in off the sealed road. After he had driven a bouncy mile or so along the somewhat narrow track, he found a small grove of trees and bushes growing beside what would be a small creek after any significant rain. The light drizzle that was intermittently falling from the grey skies had not been sufficiently heavy so far to get the stream running. He studied the site but decided there would be no flooding problem without the rain getting a whole lot heavier. The sandy soil appeared to be doing a good job of soaking the current wetness up! According to the weather website he liked to use, the rain would stay light for the rest of the day and clear away overnight. Good. He had no desire to be caught in some flash flood!

He found a small flattened area off to the left of the main track and parked the truck out of the way just in case someone did come along. Getting out, he wandered over to a gnarly-looking tree that he decided would be his first test victim. He closed his eyes for a second and brought up the kinetic shield spell in his mind, checking it over, and then opening his eyes, he cast it on the tree. He stepped back till he was a good fifty feet away, then raised the rifle and shot the tree. Nothing appeared to happen. Hmm. He came over to the tree and felt the force field. Yep. In place. He looked around the area at the foot of the bush, and there was the bullet. It was rather flattened and, ouch, hot! All right, that worked. But what about the energy transfer from the impact? All that energy had to go somewhere, some went into flattening and heating the bullet, but he guessed most had been absorbed by the tree, which, being anchored in the ground, must have simply absorbed it. Hmm.

Right. He needed something a bit less solid to use as a test dummy. He looked around and decided that the small, ragged bush over there would do. Snap off a few branches and then drape his jacket over the bush. He cast the spell and walked back to around fifty feet away again. A bang and the coat and bush went backward hard, the fabric tearing in the branches before coming to rest. Hmm. He ran over and found the force field still intact, but the force of the bullet had pushed the center of the jacket back through the bush for a yard or more, tearing the lining in places as the branches were punched backward by the force of the bullet. The part of the coat that had been pushed back was centered around the point of impact like he had shoved it with a stick, a really hard shove! Right. The bullet hadn’t penetrated the shield, but he could imagine his guts being splattered by the force of such a strike even though the bullet would never actually reach his skin. Eek.