The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

“It’s like this.”

He was big and heavy, and technically my magic wasn’t powerful enough to move something along that was so massive. As I had a pretty good Caster Level, that showed how much Mr. Hill actually weighed.

But, contrary to normal magical rules, taking him along expended almost no power at all.

One of my jobs was extending my own lived-line. I used a bicycle to do so, since I didn’t have any magical wheels or anything. I could easily extend my Line thirty to forty miles in just an hour of committed riding, and I’d made sure to parallel most of the main traffic arteries, as well as head into areas of interest, be they tourism, research areas, banking, the harbor, or whatnot.

We rose up out of the ground in a section of the harbor, shadowed by the warehouses here. Mr. Hill grunted for a moment, blinking his eyes and looking around as the world effectively spun around him and recentered.

“Whoa,” he muttered, not really wavering, but re-establishing a connection that had probably never shifted so abruptly like that. “That... felt pretty weird,” he acknowledged. “I felt like one of those compasses that was just spinning around in place for a moment there.”

“The magic has to compensate for a lot of stuff. Changes in rotational velocity, air pressure, temperature changes, magnetic orientation. You probably have it tougher, because you’re more sensitive to gravity and magnetics than most folks, but you can endure a bunch more, so it’s just a matter of getting used to it and forcibly stabilizing yourself.”

He grunted and looked around. There were cars passing by on the road nearby, but nobody in line of sight walking around. “What were you doing around here?” he asked in a knowing tone.

“Oh, following some smugglers to a cache of stuff in one of the warehouses here. Then I, uh, ripped them off pretty bad.”

His eyes glittered. “I think I heard about that. The Black Dragons were making noises about being hit by someone. They’re associated with the Yellow Claw, so watch yourself.”

“Yes, mother!” I waved my hands, and we vanished again.

---

This time we came out on one of the turning circles for the Coastal Highway that ran up and down the length of the Great Coast. The scenic highway had been one of my main lived-line extensions, and I’d already long passed Sacramento and was nearly to Chehali, what was Seattle in Washington State in another time and place.

There was nobody at this one, a circle extending out from the highway on a desolate cliff a couple hundred miles north of LA, overlooking the sea.

Again, Mr. Hill froze up, getting his planetary bearings, before turning around and looking at the rolling Pacific behind himself. He took a couple deep breaths, inhaling the ocean air, a kind of wistful look in his eyes.

“Water seems unfriendly now, aye?” I asked him, leaning on the railing there.

“I’m too heavy to swim, although I don’t need to breathe. Been knocked in the drink a few times, it’s a pain walking back to shore.” He shrugged as he looked out over the sea with his usual stony face. “Used to swim pretty good, back in the day.”

“Well, if it’s not too deep, you should be able to Heavylaunch yourself right out of it now, although it’ll definitely impact your range. If you like I can fix up something, an anklet or something, that lets you walk on water.”

“Yeah?” He sounded both interested and fatalistic. “How much?”

“It’ll cost three pounds of platinum to make, or five times that in gold.” He whistled low despite himself, then nodded. “Double that for what I have to put into it, and that’s the cost, so six pounds of platinum is the cheapest way to go.”

“And I’ll be able to walk on water?”

“You’ll have absolute positive or neutral buoyancy as you desire, so you could go swimming if you want to... although given your mass, you’ll still need fins or paddles if you want to make any speed swimming. You’ll be able to run like it’s wet sand.

“But, you can’t use basic Heavyfoot atop or in water. Moving in water fast is a skill all its own.”

“I’ll take it. Damn. Now I gotta find another job for us.”

“For you,” I corrected him mildly. “I’ll come if you want me or need me, but keep percentages of jobs separate from personal trades.”

“Or from really expensive cakes?” he sighed despite himself, then sucked loudly on his new gobstopper.

“Damn right. Ready for another jump, or you ready to try one yourself?”

“I got a question.”

“Sure?”

“Can I stop this from happening to me?”

“Defense first. Sure. As far as I go, you’re too heavy to move this way unless you want me to move you. For others, use your Heavyfoot and just anchor yourself to the planet and oppose what they are doing. Your dimensional signature will just get too damn big to be moved, and you can walk right through something like that.” I paused, and thought about that. “You could probably use it to break down a Gate or Portal or something that way. Just up your link to the planet beyond what it can tolerate, like the Veil between worlds being a thousand times stronger, and just walk through one. It’ll break like glass.”

“Huh! I been at a couple of those shindigs. Nice thing to know.”

“There’s a lot of advantages to being big and strong. Just gotta take advantage of ‘em.”

“Schmot Gurl.” He cuffed me on the head lightly, I mostly ducked away from it, flapping at his hand and doing nothing to it. “Where to now, girl?”

“Redwood National Forest.”

-------

He breathed in the air of the forest as we rose up into the shadow of one of the great pines. Silly me didn’t pay the toll to get in, either.

He reached out to pat the towering root base of the tree next to us, glancing over the edge to see a tour group coming by in a bus not far away. Obviously, I’d ridden my bike off the road down behind the tree to get to this place. “Some of the rarest wood in the world right here. I understand they only cut down one a year, and they plant several to replace it, in time.”

“The Tribes do a good job looking out for the land. They’ve got a longer view than most Europeans do, and certainly most Muricans.” I patted the tree as well, lamenting my lack of Druidic Levels. Oh, well. “How was that trip?

“I think coming to the natural area helped. Like the pavement was interfering with what you were trying to show me.” I inclined my head in understanding. “Yeah, I think I can do something. I’m not sure if I can direct it properly, but I’m willing to give it a try and see what happens.”

I reached out to Attract my hand to his. “Go ahead.” Even if his power didn’t extend to me, tagging along on a Teleport only took a Valence if you knew how to Teleport yourself.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and a slurp. He exhaled long and slow over ten seconds, and I felt the earthpower tremble under his feet, as if he’d poked something, and it was turning over.

Then we fell down into the ground, and shifted away.

My teleportation was a whizzing, speeding sensation, moving along my Lived-Line to a prior point in space, and getting popped out some place I’d already been in along that connection. This was a shifting, as if the ground was scrolling past underneath us, and suddenly we were rising up and out and standing somewhere else.

My turn to be a bit disoriented. I focused on retaining my balance, noting the decreased air pressure, angle of sunlight, and air temperature.

“Huh. This doesn’t look like Jersey,” Mr. Hill mused, looking up at the blue sky and white cloud around us. Kinda scrub prairie lands, some low trees and bushes around...

“Northeast Texas,” I said after casting Detect Location. I pointedly looked down. “By any chance was the spot you were visualizing on pavement?”

It was hard to miss the road cutting across the way right next to us, but we were on the untouched, natural shoulder to it.

“I think it was.”

“Make a note. Visualize some place on real ground. We’ll try it again, later.”

“Not right now?” He seemed confused.

“Remember what I told you about the Land putting you somewhere to get rid of something?”

“Oh, yeah.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “That’s why I’m packing. And we were facing that direction.” He pointed down the road. “Any idea what’s ahead?”

I flicked up a Holo from my Visual File, and accessed the careful memories I’d made from a territorial atlas for both here and the States, and indeed, as many countries as I could get maps of. Sure, I didn’t have street maps of most places, but at least I knew where I was in the broader sense of things.

“I think that’s Brownfield down the road about five miles?” I hazarded, indicating our position. “Based on where we are, I think it’s one of the freeholds that popped up after the slaves were brought over here.”

When the Staters were driven back across the river, as they’d once driven the Tribes before them, that naturally left a lot of land open, and needing population, the slaves had been invited to settle on those open lands and in the houses left behind... as long as they became citizens of the Tribes.

That hadn’t been a hard decision at all. Many of the cities had been repopulated quickly, and continued immigration over the years, largely from South and Central America, or Asia, had continually increased the population, a flow of lives that was still happening today. Even some Eurobloods were allowed to immigrate to the Tribes, although their numbers here were far below proud ex-slaves and grim Tribesmen. The view of Caucasians as land-stealing warmongers who couldn’t be trusted to keep their word was pretty much a mainstay of Tribal culture at this point, which didn’t help any Muricans who happened to come here.

Such towns were usually dominated by ex-slave and mingled Tribal blood, both local and from points much farther south.

“Probably built along a river,” Mr. Hill noted and started forwards with his normal, long-legged stride. “We in a hurry?”

“I don’t think so.” I matched his stride easily, sliding along so I didn’t have to trot to keep up.

---

“You notice something?” I asked him after about five minutes and most of a mile had swung by.

He grunted. “This was a major byroad on your map. We ain’t seen any cars coming this way...”

I pointed abruptly. “Didn’t that Pinto pass us a few minutes ago?”

He paused in place, having a higher vantage than I did, turning left. “Look at the ground.”

I edged out into the road, and saw a big swathe of the vegetation was just gone. It was eaten right down to the soil, leaving nothing but bare stones behind as it extended into the distance off the road. Now that I was looking for it, it was plain it had hit the shrubs next to the road, too, which I thought had been just clear-cut.