Mom’s suspicions allayed, or perhaps merely delayed, we cleaned up the table in semi-companionable silence. I think my mom is playing the “guilty people want to get the story out fast” game, so I just dry the dishes as she and dad get them ready, then stack them into the cupboard.

Clean up done, I headed to my room to practice with my psionic grip. Although not as useful as healing, I just wasn’t going to sit in my room intentionally hurting myself over and over. I can’t see that methodology not doing significant damage to my psychological make-up, or perhaps some lasting harm like when I uncontrollably overexerted myself at the Omniology. Sure, I could willpower my way into doing it, but it’s a double drain on my endurance, so I can see that going way wrong. Perhaps with someone else on overwatch, but not going to do that flying solo. I’m crazy, not stupid, at least most of the time.

Bah. I didn’t plan this well. If I’d planned this, I’d have grabbed up an assortment of rocks or something that I could use as test weights. I had shoes. Boots. Some clothing. Speaking of clothes, there’s some serious stank emanating from the pile in the corner. That needs some work, so I head to the bathing room and discover that I forgot to drain the tub. Which is a handy accident, since I discovered it. Otherwise, I might be treated to a healthy dose of CSL 10, which consists of variants of “clean up after yourself,” and its corollary CSL 11, “I’m your mother, not your servant”, as well as some extra helpings of the maternal stink-eye.

Scrubbing done, I wring out the clothes by hand, then put the clothes in the buckets, and pull the stopper from the bottom of the tub. Back to the garden I go, buckets in hand. I pause on the way out, grabbing up some clothes pegs so I can hang my items out to dry.

I rinse the clothes in the buckets, pouring the excess water onto the pile of shame in the corner. Wringing out the clothes one last time, I hang them up to dry. I take the buckets to the shed, and then grab up three different sized small to medium rocks from the yard.

One rock at roughly half of a pound, another at one to two pounds, and the last is a three pound behemoth. OK, so behemoth might be a huge stretch, but the big problem with anything larger is this: even a mere five pound rock would be roughly a four-inch diameter spheroid. That wasn’t something I could just carry into the house without significant potential for drawing some unwanted attention.

Test equipment gathered, I walk back into the house, and quickly make my way towards my room. My parents are out front on the porch, having a conversation with themselves or perhaps with the neighbors, so I could have brought in a larger rock, but wasn’t worth the risk. Exchanging speed for quiet, I slow my steps and continue on, as I’d rather not get drawn outside and into conversation. Physically, I’m still at the awkward age where I’m grown enough to speak up in porch conversations, but I’ve been looked at as an oddity almost every time I do so. I have more interesting things to do than discuss the coming fall, or the Steuben’s new door trim paint color choice, or whatever the neighborhood gossip is these days.

Closing my door, I arrange the rocks in a line from smallest to the largest. I sit down on my bed and begin to concentrate. The small rock moves smoothly, with only a bit of wobble at the start. The medium does the same, but I notice that it’s pulling more at my energy levels. I immediately feel a bit of a chilling effect as energy pours out of me when I move the heaviest one, which is far less controlled than the other two. So, probably 5 pounds would be a safe upper limit on what I could sustain for more than a moment. I keep the heaviest rock just barely in the air until I start to feel myself shiver, then set it down. By my count, it’d taken about 26 seconds before that point. I didn’t have a pocket watch, so that was based on the one one thousand approximation method.

Working meditation next, I began recovering my reserves, the shivers fading quicking. I spent about 30 minutes for 30 seconds of output. Not going to start using this ability for everyday uses, but it might be a way to check my relative strength against the skills list? Energy mostly recovered, I repeated the test on the largest rock, this time only lasting for a count of 17 before I started getting chill-induced shivers. A little mental math said a bit over 60% of the previous performance. One final test cycle resulted in barely ten seconds of capacity, coming in at roughly another 60% reduction. My preliminary conclusion was that 30 minutes of meditation was not fully replenishing my reserves. I also considered the possibility that repeated use of the ability had some loss in power efficiency, but that was far less likely since the first phase of testing with the lower weights didn’t have the same issue, even though it had been performed back to back without any meditation break.

Done with my heavy mental power tests, I meditated one final time for the evening. Once done, I did a final round of work focusing on control and precision using the smallest rock. I managed to keep it in the air for a substantially longer duration. After 30 minutes of floating it around, drawing first circles, then squares, pyramids, cubes, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, and finally failing several times at an icosahedron I was feeling drained of energy and mental capacity. Since I was also starting to get a bit bored, I put my pet rocks under my bed, and lay down to slumber. One last skill check before bed.

{

Skills:

Energy Conversion

2.907

Energy Emission

2.565

Energy Control

2.138

Channeling

0.053

Meditation

2.560

Walking

5.017

}

Based on that check, I believe that telekinetic coordination is based on Control, and what I can lift is based on Emission. There’s something off about the power scale, perhaps it’s scaling geometrically, perhaps with weight, but also with distance? I don’t know. I am certain that power is not only based on weight in a linear fashion, because the drain increased substantially more than double to lift twice the weight. Without hard data, the exact math cannot be done, and rough estimation must suffice. It takes much more than double the effort to provide less than double the lift power at a given distance, and that is unfortunately the best I can do for now. Also, complex concentration while using power appeared to build up my channeling skill. I still can’t be sure what that skill actually measures. But since it appeared related to psionics, I planned keep it in my short list. My best guess at this point is that skills don’t actually give me anything, but rather represent my ability to do things, and the observed “bump” at a tenth is more that I’ve grasped some key thing about how that skill works.

As I begin to drift off to sleep, I have a minor snicker at my own expense on that last bit. Here I was, moving stuff with my brain without touching it and I was getting a bit blasé about it already, merely because I couldn't move much. Score one for the human ability to quickly grow accustomed to improved conditions, I guess.

Next enddays, I’ll have more experiments to do, but tomorrow is Oneday, so back into the exciting world of general goods I must go. Thalers don't just grow on trees.