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

Urasmian had said that magic had to be done using words in the Keftios language only, and he wondered why that was when he had clearly shown that magic wasn’t restricted to that language. Odd. He considered the hybrid spell he had just used and saw that most of the action words were still in Keftios. The few English words he had used were only there to define the action he wanted to make happen, for which he had found no suitable Keftios words. Interesting. He would have to continue to study the matter more and see what other hybrid spells he could come up with! Why Urasmian and others from the sorcerer’s Earth believed you could only use the Keftios language was still a question to be pondered, though. There had to be something to it, as you’d think that over three thousand years, someone would have tried adding words to spells from other languages, wouldn’t they?

He put the thought aside for the moment and began formulating ideas for spells that would enable him to do all sorts of interesting things! If he could mix in English words, then the spell crafting became a whole lot easier! He decided that he would only use English words where he had no alternative, although he resolved to try an English-only spell at some point. There were all sorts of things he should be able to do now that he’d overcome the language restriction. That night he thought about the use of Keftios only and decided that perhaps it was like they still used Latin for animal and plant proper names. Maybe if you had the whole language available and only a limited tech base, it meant there had been no need for anyone to actually sit down and develop a spell without using Keftios. Hmmm.

His not having to work made life easier. Even if it meant he had no money! A week of pondering and practicing had resulted in him developing a range of spells, and he was pawing through his old superhero comics, looking for more ideas. The hardest part was not showing off! He wanted to show off his newfound abilities to his friends so much! Impress the girls who never gave his nerdy self a second look! Right wrongs and beat up bad guys! Just like a real superhero! Fortunately, his common sense got in the way of his wanting to show off. It was tempting, oh so tempting, but no. He had to keep his newfound abilities hidden and to himself for the moment. Real-life wasn’t like a movie or a comic. Of that, he was certain.

It had always been very obvious to him, at least since he was fourteen or fifteen, that there was a clear dichotomy between real life and the world of superheroes, as shown in the comics and movies. The movie and comic superheroes lived an almost completely make-believe life, as far as he could determine. In real life, someone who could do what he could do would be jumped on by the government, locked away, and studied before being made to work for the government. And if not his own government, then some other less scrupulous one would kidnap him almost certainly. Any government would want his sort of power for themselves, not running around loose! And even if he could protect himself, that would only mean they would kidnap or threaten his family and or friends to get leverage on him.

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!

He jumped like a yard in the air and nearly fell over in surprise! Fuck! Then the full impact of what he’d just done hit him. Yeah! He hadn’t really believed it would work. Not really! His heart was thumping out an African drum solo in his chest, and he felt so light-headed he abruptly sat down on the packed dirt of the track and almost started hyperventilating. He sat for a couple of minutes until he had the incipient hyperventilating under control, and his breathing had calmed back down to almost normal. Then he grinned to himself. He was a sorcerer! He looked at the broom handle and changed the word for east to the one for north. He knew the word from the tablets, along with the words for the other three cardinal directions. He ran through the spell, and the broom handle, sorry, axle, disappeared and reappeared four or so yards north! Oh yes! After using the spell, he felt extremely light-headed again and decided it would be better to continue sitting on the ground rather than try and get up.

He looked over at the hillside beyond the road and thought about moving the broom handle east about thirty paces so it would reappear inside the hill. Then he realized that moving the broom handle into the same space as the hill could cause the atoms to fuse, well, maybe. Oooo. A fusion bomb, possibly. Right here. Not a good idea. He could be wrong, of course. He probably was, in fact. Particle physics wasn’t his area of expertise after all, but he decided that interpenetrating solid objects was something he would experiment with from a long, long way away! If at all! He went to stand up and immediately saw stars, so he reluctantly sat down again and tried to calm himself some more.

After about five minutes, he felt his body had calmed down enough to get up, and it was then that he realized that his real problem was going to be the lack of vocabulary. He really didn’t have the words he needed to do other magic. If that was what it was. It was possible that what he was doing was simply redefining the position of certain atoms in the space-time continuum. Uh-huh. It was an interesting explanation of the teleportation thing that he had come up with after Urasmian’s little disappearing act. Was that what was happening, or was he just rationalizing an effect of real magic? He looked at a spot on the road about a hundred yards up the slope. Right….

He grinned to himself and fiddled with the spell. It didn’t take him long to develop a modified version of the spell in his head, and then he said it with power. And he was a hundred yards up the road, slightly off-balance, as his reappearing a foot higher variable was only just enough to keep him above the road… but whoa! He thought about the spell and then looked at the ground near the truck, about a hundred and twenty yards away. He removed the distance component and changed the height to be two inches above the ground level at the spot he was looking at. He ran it through his head again and decided he had indeed made a spell to simply move there. As in that spot right there. Focus. Cast the spell, and there he was! He dropped two inches and nearly collapsed while seeing stars and feeling faint! He sat down, which this time didn’t really help as he still kept seeing stars, so he lay down completely on the dirt track while feeling very strange.

Late again – sorry

And even if it did work, he may not have the control he’d need, given the limited vocabulary he had to work with. He had the recording of Urasmian’s translocation spell as well as the sizable collection of Minoan words he’d painstakingly built up over the last few months, both before and after he’d presented his Doctoral Thesis. The trouble was that the words from the tablets were all descriptions used for accounting purposes, such as animal and equipment totals, five sheep, or whatever. They weren’t a general vocabulary of sentences forming an entire language like you would get from a novel, for instance. So he knew it was going to be hard to use the limited word choice to both do things and control them, and that was presuming this even worked!

He had the broom handle with the aluminum foil end bits semi-welded onto each end by whatever the spell did with him. He retrieved it from the pick-up and added it to his collection of materials before sitting down on another handy rock outcrop to consider what he intended to do for a minute or two. Alright, he thought to himself, let’s start with what I know. He opened the laptop up and put his headphones in, and listened to the recording he’d made of Urasmian speaking the translocation spell as he embedded it in the wooden handle. Even though he now understood the words, he re-ran the recording a few more times until he was sure he had it memorized.

He then recorded his version and listened to the replay. The laptop’s built-in microphone wasn’t the best, but it sounded pretty right to his ear. He listened to the original and did a second recording. That was better. He had left off the bit at the end that actually enabled the spell just to be sure his laptop didn’t go whizzing off somewhere! He couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been able to understand the words used in the spell, or at least the meanings of the words used. He was glad Urasmian’s translation spell was still working! Which brought up the question of how long it would continue to work. That was something Jason had no idea of the answer, as Urasmian had never said.

He then considered the list of words he had from the tablets and found only one that was any sort of match for the broom handle. So, it would be pronounced like that. Hmm. Right. And phrases would probably sound like this… Right.  The broom handle could be called an axle, as in the word used on several tablets to record the number of chariot axles a person owned. He got the impression that chariot axles tended to break regularly as everyone listed as having a chariot always had more than one axle.

Okay. Let’s see if that works. He ran the modified translocation spell through his head several times and listened to the original a couple more times. He substituted in the word for five paces for the distance and axle instead of the word for a person and moved the broom handle to a clear spot ten yards up the track. He stepped back and said the spell aloud while focusing on the broom handle. It disappeared and clattered to the ground about four yards further up the track!