He started playing about nine in the evening and left the casino at one, thirty thousand pounds up,, around thirty-six thousand dollars. By the time he flew out on Friday, he was nearly a hundred thousand dollars up and getting strange looks from some of the staff, although the pit bosses and senior supervisors, it seemed, had not lost their faith in the roulette wheels getting it all back over the long run! Ha.
Chapter 15
Back at home
Flying home, he knew he should feel guilty but found he just didn’t care where the casinos were concerned. They existed to fleece people of their money and were therefore fair game as far as Jason was concerned. Back in San Diego, he made no mention to his parents of the sheer amount of money he had won. He told them he had enjoyed the dig in England, gone to Monte Carlo to check out was probably the most famous Casino in the world, and had actually done quite well there. He brushed off their concerns mentioning he had several thousand euros that he needed to change, which stopped them cold, and they were flabbergasted when he admitted he had brought home nearly ten thousand euros in cash and five thousand pounds as well!
Even though he thought the casinos deserved what he was doing to them, his conscience nagged him that what he was doing was wrong. Which it was. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The casinos made their money by fleecing the unwary, but no one made people walk in the front door of any casino in the world. They did it voluntarily. He wasn’t going to stop lining his pockets with their money, but the more he thought about it, the more he became determined not to slip into the behavioral patterns of those “supers” from that TV series who engaged in any activity they thought expedient. No sir. A little Robin Hooding with casinos was as far down that slope he was going to let himself go!
He spent a couple of days relaxing after his return and then decided to concentrate on improving his magic skills, working on several things he had thought of while in Europe. He worked on developing a narrow, high-powered version of the kinetic force he was using to move the roulette balls. With practice, he quickly developed the power to punch a small hole through a wooden board at ten yards range. He had thought of a problem with his bullet shield and was proven right when a baseball club still clobbered the bush in his test ravine despite the defensive spell. The bat simply wasn’t moving fast enough to disintegrate. Hmmm.
He played around with other ideas, including an idea for a knockout spell that would be useful. The problem with that was that he couldn’t really test the spell without going for a walk in a bad area of town which could put him in trouble if it didn’t work! He spent a lot of time reading physics books and books on physiology, trying to work out things he could do. To overcome the slow-motion attack, he developed a shield spell that put a circular barrier in front of him that resisted slow attack weapons such as strikes by baseball bats! It would probably also work against swords, spears, arrows, and similar weapons if he traveled to other Earths where things were not as advanced as here on his Earth. The problem with the shield spell was that it was exactly that, a shield and only covered his front. Hmmm.
He studied how weather worked online and began playing around with the local weather above his ravine. It took him a while to work out how to generate a strong up current that pushed the warmer ground-level air upwards, creating a vertical air column reaching higher and higher. And even longer to get it to turn into a small local thunderstorm complete with lightning bolts. Plus, it was exhausting! He found he had to leave thunderstorm creation till last each practice session; otherwise, it wiped him out so badly he couldn’t do anything else. The trouble with getting the storm creation to last was that trying to do it after practicing other magical activities meant he was tackling it when already worn out, so progress was slow! And frustrating! And the online explanations of how weather worked were only so much help with practical storm creation.
