The next few weeks were spent studying what he could and couldn’t do, or at least what he couldn’t work out how to do. Flying was one thing that defeated him. He simply couldn’t make himself fly like Superman. Hmm. There had to be something he was doing wrong, but he couldn’t work out what it was. He left off working on that after numerous failed attempts and several bumps and scrapes and concentrated on other things. He practiced his ball control on the mini-roulette table but also practiced what he came to call a force punch out in the ravine. He simply pushed out the kinetic energy or whatever it was he used to move the roulette ball in a much stronger, forceful manner. After a few days of practice, he actually broke a small sapling off about a yard up from the ground! He stood there and thought about it some more before narrowing the punch down to a pencil-thin projection of force and then punched a hole right through a small tree’s trunk!

In between forays out to what he began calling his testing grounds, he made a bit more money at the local casinos, being sure not to be too obvious, or at least he tried not to be! Anyway, they didn’t ban him or anything, nor did he notice anyone paying him any special attention. At some point, he decided that he was ready to hit the big time and booked flights to Las Vegas!  His folks weren’t happy about the whole idea when he told them where he was going, but surprisingly, they didn’t give him too much serious grief, confining themselves to a general air of silent disapproval.

Chapter 10

Roulette magic

It had been really satisfying seeing the looks on his parent’s faces when he said he didn’t need any money for his trip to Vegas.

“I’ve won enough to pay for the trip plus have plenty of spending money when I’m there, so don’t worry. I’m not using up any of my pathetic savings or anything.”

The implication of how well he’d been doing locally, ostensibly playing poker, meant they had no real grounds to object to his trip. It was still rather nerve-wracking going on his own to somewhere as larger than life as Vegas, not that he told his parent that, but in the event, the trip from the airport to his hotel was interesting but not as exciting as he had been expecting. Vegas was like a combination of a theme park interwoven amongst large office blocks, almost. It had shed the bright lights and mob-ruled vibe of decades past and looked more like silicon valley these days.

Jason wandered around the casino floor for a bit, scoping out the roulette tables, crowd, and casino staff. He had deliberately chosen to start in a different casino to the one in his hotel, and after wandering around, he decided it really wasn’t any different from the casinos back in San Diego, just bigger and much busier. Finally, he headed for a table with only a few people around it. As he approached the table, he discovered that he was far more nervous than he had expected to be! Damn. The difference between playing in the little leagues and hitting the big time! By the time he reached the table, it felt like he didn’t just have a few butterflies in his stomach; no, it felt like there was a whole air wing performing combat aerobatics in there! Finally, he stopped just short of the wheel area at the head of the table. He closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths, and tried to settle. He was too strung out to concentrate properly.

He picked up the rifle, aimed, then squeezed the trigger, not knowing what to expect, and what he got was a small flash of light and then nothing. Huh? He ran over, and the jacket looked untouched. In fact, he didn’t think it had moved at all. Of the bullet, there was no sign. Hmm. He was mentally keeping the spell active despite the tiredness he was feeling already, so he trotted back to his mark and rapidly fired three more rounds at the jacket. Each time, there was a small flash of light or something, and then nothing. Neither the jacket nor the bush moved as much as an inch! Woohoo! He wondered how big and fast the shell would have to be for it to overcome whatever it was the spell was doing. Would it work with flying objects like, say, shrapnel? He had no way of testing those problems, at least not at this moment with the gear he had available. Still, he now had a bulletproof shield! Watch out, bad guys! Ha. He had a mental image of himself walking through a hail of bullets like the Terminator carrying that coffin! Woohoo!

But then he sobered as he felt dizzy. He started seeing stars and cut the spell, but he was so drained he nearly fell over. he staggered back to the truck for a drink while he considered things. How did you go about finding bad guys, and is that what he really wanted to do? And would the government be keen on him wandering around doing almost superhero stuff without wanting to study and use him themselves? No. Almost certainly not. Hmm. The last thing he wanted was notoriety. There would be no respite for him, his family, or even his friends. FBI, NSA, KGB, or whatever the current incarnation of them was, bloody Mossad, the Chinese, sheesh. They’d be all over him like the plague! Right. No public displays without a good cover! Damn, that meant no showing off for the girls! He realized that not showing off was going to be the hardest thing of all. Fuck!

Very well, so be it. He had recovered somewhat from holding the kinetic shield on the bush, so it was time to get back to the magic spells. He had thought about fireballs which should be doable in an oxygen atmosphere. He had even come up with a spell that he thought would work. He focused on a bush some distance away and cast the spell, which caused the atoms to vibrate and create heat. A few seconds and a sort of distortion appeared in the air, and then poof!

The whole bush and the air in the immediate area all exploded in a fireball! Which didn’t last very long nor spread to other nearby bushes, which was fortunate, he realized somewhat ruefully as he studied the smoldering remains. The sheer ferocity of the blaze that had engulfed the bush had surprised him. The bush kept smoldering for a while, even though the wood had to be green and full of sap. The surrounding bushes were not all that suitable for getting a brush fire going, which was lucky. He wouldn’t want to use it on any old brush, though! From his previous experience with the few spells he had come with already, he knew he would need to practice the spell to improve control and power, but well, now he was really starting to feel like a wizard from a fantasy novel! And it was all really just basic science, well, not the translocation perhaps, nor the bullet thing, he had to admit. Well, it was sort of, but the force punch thing he was using to push the roulette wheel ball around was, well, it wasn’t really standard physics either, he supposed. At least the fireball spell was basic physics, pretty much, except that he used mental abilities to cause it to happen. Damn. He realized he was still using real physics for the basis of his “magic,” just using it to do things real physics didn’t allow. He supposed he was a sorcerer now. Maybe. Bah, who cares! I can throw fireballs! He laughed out loud and kept smiling to himself all the way home.

Just a quick update:
Taroniah & Kyron Unite is with the editor and should be released around the end of the month – I was hoping for a late January release date but it appears to be slipping into the 1st week of February.
The next book will be The Mercenary – the first of the Count of the Western Marches series which is Princess Gizel’s second series. Probably early April
After that will be Taroniah at Home
Probably late June
Then Kyron the Conqueror
Maybe early September
Then the Kelad Conflict the 4th New Federation book
Probably in November.

release dates at provisional and not cast in stone!

For those interested I have another story set in Pam Uphoff’s universe – totally unrelated to the first that I am working on

I have submitted a short story about Bargan – when he is in his final year at the Academy – and has to deal with a snooty noble.
This may grow into a complete Bargan novel – not sure yet.
I have another vague idea for a Taroniah story set after Taroniah at Home but I have not real plot yet.
I do have an alt-history story about a yachtsman dropped back tot he Maine coast in like the 12th century and finds the survivors of Welsh Prince Madoc’s first expedition being overwhelmed by the natives.
And of course I have other stories – besides Jason who runs to 5 books at present – most just bits and pieces – 2 is 3/4 done and 5 is 1/2 done….

Anyway – I will press on with The Mercenary

He also found he was mentally exhausted from holding the spell on the two targets at such a distance. He considered trying a couple of other ideas he had thought of, but he was so exhausted mentally that in the end, he packed it in and headed home with lots to think about. The following two days, he read up on kinetic energy and energy transference, and then a crazy idea began to form regarding molecular structure. So, what about using the bullet’s energy to break down the molecular structure of the bullet and then any remaining energy being neutralized by incinerating the atoms? Is that going to work? He played around with the idea but could reach no firm conclusions because his understanding of molecular structure and energy transmutation simply wasn’t good enough. E=MC² was all well and good, but he was a historian, not a physicist!

He thought about that for a bit. Hmm. Did he need to follow normal physics? It wasn’t like you could do this shit according to ordinary physics anyway. He thought about the translocation spell, the force spell he used to control the roulette wheel ball, and the force field he’d used to stop the bullet. None of them were things you could do as far as regular physics was concerned. Yes, they were essentially obeying the laws of physics in the sense that they were doing real things. The translocate spell was simply relocating all the atoms of the transported item to a different location in the space-time continuum. The force spell he used on the roulette ball was something else, as was the force field thing, he guessed. No matter. He threw conventional physics out and concentrated on coming up with a spell that did what he wanted, regardless of whether it obeyed the laws of physics or not. It took a bit of time, but he came up with a spell design that essentially did a magic hand-wavy thing to solve the kinetic energy punching a dent in him problem. The spell took the bullet’s kinetic energy and used it to break down the bullet into stationary individual atoms, with any energy left over being radiated as light. The spell was complicated and would be hard to throw, and he rather thought it violated one or more laws of physics, but in terms of the magic spell system, or at least the magic spell system as far as he could work it out, the spell he came up with made perfect sense. Armed with this improvisation, he headed back out to the test ravine to try it out, although he was not really expecting much, given his dodgy treatment of physics! He returned to the same spot, and while he dressed the beat-up bush in the now unwearable jacket, he ran the spell through his head several times to ensure he had it right. Satisfied, he stepped back from the jacket-draped bush, threw the spell, and wandered back to his firing mark.

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.

Two hours later, he left just over five hundred dollars ahead and far more confident of his abilities. He was also mentally drained and had trouble keeping his eyes open during the drive home. Fortunately, he was back relatively early, and his parents didn’t give him the third degree over where he had been or why he had been out so late or anything. A quick hey and yeah, I had dinner, was enough to let him get to his room, where he collapsed on the bed and woke up the next morning still dressed in the clothes he had been wearing the previous evening! Magic sure was draining! He practiced more during the week, trying different things without much success. He returned to the casino the following Friday night and made a thousand dollars before quitting, and then he worried about being too obvious in the small local casino room.

Over the next week, he checked out all the casinos in San Diego and played all the roulette tables that were available very carefully, even the ones with double zero. He worked hard at making sure he was hiding his ‘good luck’ by not winning much in any single session and appearing to lose bets frequently. He camouflaged it well enough that none of the suits in the pits paid him the least heed. By the end of the week, he was up nearly five thousand and having trouble containing the excitement he was feeling! The hardest thing was not showing off! Man, that was hard. He had to be so careful of his own actions and reactions. He was worried that they’d ban him or something if the casino staff twigged. He tried to keep a serious, calm demeanor throughout, but it was hard to resist jumping around and ensuring everyone knew he was winning!

Realizing he would do something stupid if he kept going, he took the next week off. He told his parents he had been playing poker and had made a few bucks to explain the extra money he clearly had. His dad gave him a quick lecture on gambling, about not getting in too deep and quitting while he was ahead, while his mum voiced her general disapproval of gambling as well, but neither asked him to stop. He suddenly realized that, somewhere along the line, they had started to see him as an adult. Instead of telling him what to do, now it appeared that they would advise him when they thought he needed advice but would no longer forbid him from undertaking things they didn’t want him to do. Hmm. Interesting. One benefit of his Doctorate, he supposed.

He used the week to catch up with friends, went into the university, and caught up with his former fellow students, those that were there anyway. On the next Friday, he received an email from Franny telling him about a new site in Britain on Hadrian’s wall she was going to join the dig on the following year. She had apparently been invited by the head of the research team as a welcome to the faculty thing even though she was just a junior lecturer. The fellow was head of Classical Studies at the university where she had managed to obtain a limited teaching gig. Good for her. Oh. There were still numerous spots for volunteer workers, but why invite me? He puzzled over this for a bit as his field was Minoan and Mycenean studies, not Roman. Ah. He twigged when he reread the cryptic middle part. Someone wanted to meet him, probably that girl he had seen in the video call. She was going to be on the dig, he guessed. Hmm.

Better late than never – sorry people

He refused to give up and kept trying endless different methods and ideas while getting increasingly frustrated in the process. Eventually, he gave up for the day and didn’t return to the roulette wheel until the following morning after his folks had left for work. The previous day, he had brought the wheel downstairs and put it on the dining table after he had used his dad’s spirit level to check it was level. He repeated this positioning, idly spinning the wheel and ball until the answer suddenly hit him in the face. Individual numbers might be hard to pick, but colors weren’t! Every second slot, the color alternated! In no time at all, he was slotting the ball into either red or back with, if not with ease, at least with considerable reliability. On top of that, there were plenty of times the ball flopped in the color he wanted without him actually doing anything to help it, which stood to reason as it should land in one color or the other roughly fifty percent of the time anyway.

He practiced all day, most of the next, and by late on Friday, he was confident he could cause the ball to flop into the next number often enough. Not every time, and sometimes it bounced two or even three numbers further on, but he could do it often enough that he was becoming increasingly sure of beating able to beat the house betting red or black. He hoped. Unless there was some pitfall he wasn’t aware of when it came to a real casino’s roulette wheel. He thought of the horror stories one heard of people who got too lucky getting taken out the back and beaten up, but he was pretty sure they were just stories. They were perhaps based on things that happened back in the old days. These days he imagined the problem would be that if one casino twigged and barred him, then all the casinos would know n no time flat! No matter. He would be careful and not win too much.

On the next Friday night, after some research, he borrowed dad’s truck to “go out” and went to the Barona Casino because they had single zero roulette wheels at that casino. He fought his way through a gaggle of people to a point where he had a clear view of the wheel. He decided to go for red for the next ten spins and then black for ten. Of course, from a random number point of view, the sample was way too small but still. He managed five reds in a row, one black, then four reds out of the ten red spins. He then managed six blacks before missing and then another six before stopping. Right. Time to put his money where his newfound magic was!

He pulled twenty bucks out and put it down on the table. The dealer gave him four five-dollar chips, and he put two on red, the minimum bet being ten dollars. He was nervous as all hell, but the ball lobbed straight into a red anyway! Huh. He doubled up his bet, and, this time, he had to push the ball on and got red again. The butterflies were almost too much as he moved down to the board and picked up twenty dollars giving him ten dollars in winnings. He managed another red and collected twenty more, after which he backed off and stood in amongst the small group watching the table and didn’t try to influence the next spin, which came up black. Still, he had thirty dollars profit and had proved his idea. Probably. The whole experience of using real money on a real wheel had been so nerve-wracking that the butterflies in his gut were only now subsiding! What he needed to do right now was to sit down to get over the bad case of the shakes!

His folks started hinting about what he planned to do next. Did he envision an academic career or something else? Or at least they attempted subtle questions along those lines. He rather thought they were hinting they wanted him to tell them he was getting a job. He gathered they’d be happy with him getting any job! The truth was that he had no plans, not really. Everything had changed. He wanted to study this strange magical ability he had acquired, but he realized that to be able to do that, he had best come up with some way of making money. And some method that gave him a sizable income for as little work as possible so he could spend his spare time on the magic stuff. So, what could he do? At first, he had no idea of what he could do to earn money and how his newfound abilities would help him earn a living.

Three days later, he was trailing his folks around the mall, and they happened to pass a games shop. He begged off following them on their errand and agreed to meet them in the food court up the way. While walking past the shop, he noticed a roulette wheel and had an idea. He entered the store and found a spot where he could see the roulette wheel better and decided his idea looked like it was maybe workable. After contemplating the roulette wheel for a minute or two, he asked the shop attendant if he could get a close look at the mini-roulette wheel they had in the window. Okay. Casinos all around the world had roulette wheels, and they were famed for being unbeatable. There was a spell idea he had been fooling around with that might just be usable on a roulette wheel. He spent a good amount of time studying the mini-roulette wheel, and in the end, he spent nearly sixty bucks buying the thing.

During the next week, while his parents were at work, he experimented with the roulette wheel. Of course, it was much smaller than a real one, and the ball was much fiddlier, but he practiced and practiced trying to make the ball land in a particular number. At this, he failed dismally unless the wheel turned so slowly that it almost stopped. He seriously doubted that casinos would let their wheels get that slow. No matter what he tried, he just couldn’t get the ball to land in the number he wanted reliably. After a week of disappointment, he was about ready to give up on the whole idea. Instead, he took a break from it for a couple of days while playing around with other stuff. He worked on the translocation speel, which was what he started calling the spell that moved things. He could only move one thing at a time, but if he held something, that object would translocate with him.

Three days later, he sat down and studied the roulette wheel problem again. So, what could he do? He spent another couple of hours trying various things, but the basic problem was that the wheel’s rotation made it too difficult to focus on any one number as it whizzed around. Or even a number type, as in a big number or odd number. He could sort of pick out single digits as the wheel spun, but they were so spread out around the wheel that it was still hard to get the ball to stop in one. He would probably make money if he tried betting on the single-digit numbers, but it was erratic. At least on this small roulette wheel.

New Federation 3

After the successive military disasters they had suffered, the Hareccans were only too happy to make peace with the Terrans, especially given the generous peace terms they offered. The Taxons, under Crown Prince Frogar, found the Hareccans unwilling to negotiate peace at first and had to invade their territory before they were prepared to come to the table. Then, after days of negotiating, the Hareccans were suddenly pressing for peace on any terms. Apparently, they had discovered a more serious threat than either the Taxons or the Terrans, and they wished to concentrate their ships in preparation for facing the Kelad onslaught.
Available at Amazon

And trying to do the secret identity thing was just plain stupid. As if they wouldn’t be able to find the bat cave in real life with satellites and GPS trackers! He was pretty sure facial recognition technology would defeat most disguises given time. And then there was the whole matter of making his family and friends hostages to fortune, which is what would happen. Could he even trust the government? There was a whole raft of books, movies, and television shows that seemed to say that no, he couldn’t trust the government. Were they all being overly paranoid? Maybe. Probably. But there sure were a lot of such stories! Then there was the question of most other governments! Hell, some governments were real hard arses! He had no intention of fighting off waves of Asian, European, or Middle Eastern agents trying to get their hands on him or his family!

As far as he could see, the only way to keep everyone safe was to remain completely anonymous and dressed in such a way as to defeat their recognition software. Hmm. And not do too many things to draw attention to himself! He would have to be so very careful if he did do anything! Make sure he left no DNA behind by always wearing gloves, facial and head coverings, and so on. Sheesh! It sure sounded like a lot of hard work to be a superhero! Was he going to be a superhero? He could be a supervillain! He thought about it but decided it just wasn’t him. He simply didn’t enjoy hurting people or animals, was not into stealing shit, and being a super badass just didn’t really appeal. Not that he was a total goody-two-shoes! He’d done his bit of schoolboy bullying, had shoplifted a chocolate bar once, and been nasty to people, particularly other kids, when he’d been young. He just didn’t enjoy that sort of stuff.

And even if he wanted to be a good guy superhero, unless something was happening right in front of him, he had little or no chance of influencing events at any distance. And that is presuming he knew about whatever it was that was happening when it was happening rather than seeing it on the news that night or the following day. He wasn’t plugged into the NSA or whatever. He decided that he might consider working for the government at some point, but for now, he didn’t think he would be treated in a manner that he would enjoy. He ran these arguments around in his head for several days without reaching any firm conclusions other than that he would hide his talents at this stage. Despite how tempting it was to show off!

Chapter 9

An income source

It was time to get back to real-world matters. He spent a week deliberating on his thesis after he had approved publishing a re-worked version as a book. He had to give it more of a book-like structure, so he made a string of final edits during another week of solid work and then sent it back to the publishers. Did a podcast interview with an archaeology-focused online site and faded back into academic obscurity as others took his work and ran with it. Then some stunning new discoveries in Roman studies attracted all the archaeological news spotlights, and he dropped off the archaeological radar, which suited him just fine