before he had to be up in the morning for meditations. Yay. That had worked out at least. It was a lot easier to sleep in a warm room than freezing cold.
The next morning Sara came for the next batch just before he had to go to breakfast, the girl didn't follow him, having promised the heating and cooling plates to some of her friends already. Well, at least they'd all sleep warm that night. He didn't really think about anything but school work for a while after that, except for making incremental shield improvements. He came up with a breathing tube function that would let him go underwater at least a bit. He still got wet, but air went into his mouth and nose as long as he didn't go deeper than three feet. At that depth he couldn't force his lungs to draw the air in for some reason, it felt like the air just wasn't thick enough. Not that he planned on trying that anytime soon, but it was nice to know he could if someone managed to throw him in the pond.
It wasn't until a few weeks later, when Kolb presented him with his next assignment of “insane combat giant” building that things really started to get shaken up. Sara had collected the templates and sent them off to her mother, so his personal copy work had ended for the time being. She gave out a lot of the fields he'd made to people at the school, which didn't bother him at all really. If they could use them, why shouldn't people have them? Tor didn't get the whole pretending they were being sold thing himself, maybe that was just a game rich people played or maybe Sara wasn't as good at selling things as she pretended? It left him more time for Kolb's new project, which was something that he'd never even thought of before.
“Wait… You want me to make it so a man can fly?”
The weapons instructor just nodded as if it wasn't a totally crazy idea. People didn't fly, did they? Could they?
“It can be done, the Austrans do it all the time. In fact their ability to move people by air is pretty much the only thing that lets them really challenge us in direct conflict. They fly over and drop chemical explosives on us from great heights. Our shields and weapons are as good or better on the ground, but as often as not they simply won't close with us for that reason. I won't tell you how to get it done, but if you could have that for me in say… a month?” The man winked at him. It was a happy thing that said… Not a lot more than that. The weapons instructor just wasn't sane.
Tor had suspected it for a long time now, this just proved it.
At first he just shook his head. The idea was ridiculous. Just crazy. Except… well, he'd seen a man fly hadn't he? The Count could do it. So could the Austrans apparently. If they could, then why couldn't he build a device for it?
A field that told the smallest portions of a person which direction to move… Well, that could be done. It was a huge field for that type of thing. Vast, which meant it would have to be strong, massively so, but basically, telling the little things to move is all a cutter did. Organize them all in a single direction, say up, harder than the downward force, and the person or object should float. Then move the field, tilting it in the direction you wanted to go to move around…
Finally Kolb shook him and asked him if he was alright. Tor nodded and walked away, not bothering saying anything. He only had a month after all. In a lot of ways this would be way harder than just shielding from things, especially if he wanted to keep it low in energy use, which was pretty much inherent in the idea. If it took too much personal energy the whole thing just wouldn't work. You'd get a few feet in the air and then freeze to death or die of exhaustion.
First he had to test the basic idea itself.
Back in his room he carefully built a small field into a wooden block that simply told it to go up in the air. Tor felt a sense of excitement when he hit the tiny sigil he'd put on the bottom. It floated up, to the ceiling of course and didn't come back down. It wasn't strong enough to make him rise, so he could hold it on the table while deactivating it. Good, it would have been embarrassing trying to explain to Rolph why a block of wood the size of his foot was stuck to their ceiling.
So part one worked. The second part, steering, was harder. Mainly because his initial idea of how to do it was flawed. The idea had made sense, directing the field with his mind, but it proved to be monstrously hard to put into practice. Even spending the rest of the month designing that part, there wouldn't be enough time to get the work done. It had to be rethought which made him sigh. It would have been so cool to direct his flight just by thinking about it like the Count could.
By using a second device, he could tilt the field in any direction at a distance, so that much worked, but he didn't have a clue as to how to pick how high it went or how to control it for a soft set down. It worried at his mind for weeks, as the deadline approached. Tor knew he was living in some kind of odd fugue state by the time he finally understood that all he needed was a simple control over how much upward directed force there was.
Duh.
It was an organizing field.
All he had to do was disorganize it slowly to come down and reorganize to rise. Tor wondered if it would do actual brain damage to beat himself in the head with a brick or if that might make him smarter? It was so basic that he should have seen the idea in seconds, not weeks.
The work itself nearly killed him, of course.
Dehydration.
The hours and days of work he was used to didn't harden him to four days without water or food apparently. Oh well. He managed to get the work done before he collapsed, and that, really, was what mattered right? Getting the job done in time?
When he woke up Trice sat next to his bed, looking more than a little pissed. Well worried at first, then angry when he focused on her. She crossed her arms and glared for a long time before she spoke.
“Dying over a school project has to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and I've heard some really lame headed things. From now on eat and drink at least if you're going to try moronic things like this… whatever it is. Got it? If not, I will personally be coming around to kick your ass next time instead of feed you broth and sooth your head with a damp cloth. Is that understood?” Her tone was severe, as if she actually meant it instead of her normal playful teasing.
Well… if he collapsed Tor couldn't do the work she and Sara wanted, he supposed. That was probably what this was all about, her protecting an asset. Still, nice of her to come around and visit him. No one else had, he noticed.
She wouldn't let him do anything except sleep for the next day. Not even get up to try out the new device as annoying as that was. The odds of it working right were small and if there were massive problems he needed to know about them so he could attempt a fix before the month was out. How she got him out of classes he didn't know. No one came to bother him about it at least, not that anyone would. He really had to be better about that, Tor knew. Attending classes was kind of why he'd come to school in the first place and they still had a lot to teach him.
Like how to not push himself into exhaustion while still getting his work done maybe? That would be a lesson he didn't want to miss.
Trice didn't sleep in his room, so he could have gone out to test the device at night, but that seemed almost suicidally stupid. Crashing into the ground or a tree because he couldn't see it? Brilliant plan. Trice would kick his behind then. What was left of it anyway. Everyone else would probably help her do it too, stomping the little red smear he left on the dirt under their hard boots. He'd wait for the next day and go slow, so that he could see his death coming at him properly when he messed up.
Excited, he got up as daylight came, false dawn, and headed out to the weapons practice square. If he crashed and died he could at least let everyone else get a good night's sleep, right? He didn't try to figure out the odds of that happening. His chances of surviving probably weren't all that good…
Wanting to kick himself he headed back to his room and got his shield. Would it work in the air? Probably. If he crashed the force should go into the ground, right? He hadn't designed it for that, but it was better than nothing, so much better he kind of wondered if anyone should fly without a shield at all, ever. He checked carefully to make sure that no one was watching, just in case it simply didn't work, or made him look funny or something. A vision of him hanging upside down screaming came to mind suddenly, which earned a nervous smile.
That would probably happen, given his luck. At least if anyone was watching. On his right hand he had a single hemp string with the small coin sized copper control plate in the palm. It made a nice enough looking square decoration at least. Tor couldn't close his hand while flying though or he'd drop from the sky, turning both fields off.
