After resting, Kaleb once again found himself on the floor of the bar. This time, he was trying to apply the lesson he’d learned earlier to multiple sites in his body.

“Most people have an array of ten spikes. There are six in the main torso, two in the arms and two in the legs. Then there are rods– these are usually only in the forearms and the shins, and aid with the directionality of fields. People rarely have coils embedded under their skin unless they are highly specialised. Mostly those amplification circuits are added externally, we’ll give you some so that you look the part of a travelling field generator.”

“Do you ever use rods or coils?”

“Hmmm sometimes. They are one part of spike development that has been quite useful. They are a productive tool. But in the end, they suffer the weaknesses of spikes– their roles as directors and amplifiers also result in them directing fields in particular ways. When you employ them, you can only operate within the bounds that they have built into them. Of course more expensive variants have more adaptability or even internal variations, but in general you still lose out on adaptability. They do make even natural field control easier. You’ve shown us your windsuit, and so you can understand how a specialised array of coils and rods can help with a specific task, such as flight. But you know, it will eventually become possible for you to manipulate your field with enough control that you won’t need them to generate a form that can produce lift.”

Kaleb found himself suddenly daydreaming about being able to fly without the windsuit. Such a possibility had never occurred to him before. Then he frowned.

“Why do you suppose that all my life I’ve never had instruction like this?”

“I really can’t speak about your home, or the reason that people there never learn this kind of thing… I can make guesses based on what you’ve told me. That this place is called Haethea… that you don’t have spikes. I can guess that some branch of faith similar to the original faith of the brethren decided to go its separate way. And even if they once possessed the teachings of the brethren, either they were withheld from future generations, or they were forgotten in time…”

“I can understand using distance as a defense against other people… but these skills would even be useful for dealing with monster attacks. If we could have had them…”

“Hmmm it is odd. These are some of the techniques of the brethren, but what we’re dealing with here is hardly stuff that is very complex, or specific to the brethren. Almost everyone is capable of these things – even those with spikes do not repudiate the importance of learning these things to some degree. To be honest, I did not think you would be… well I didn’t think you would be so underdeveloped.” Erid hurriedly raised his hands as Kaleb’s head dropped “But that is also a good thing! You can start out from a blank slate! You won’t have to undo any previous training! There’s a lot of advantages to it!” despite his attempts to reassure him, Kaleb couldn’t help but feel disappointed – and somewhat cheated. He wondered what the history of his home was, that had led to the decision to isolate itself from the rest of cable city, and why there was such a lack of field skills among his people… it felt almost deliberate, and he felt a strange sense of anger at the omission. Who was it that thought that was the best way to live? Defenseless and vulnerable, protected only by obscurity.

“But you know, that’s what Essan’s going to find out.” As if reading his mind, Erid tried to console Kaleb.

“Yeah, I hope everything works out for him. For them.”

“So do I,” Erid smiled, “but we can only work on what we’ve got in front of us. If you worry about things you’ve decided not to do, well that’s a sure pathway to losing yourself to doubt… So! Back to it. I want to see you keep those ten pools of charge for half an hour!”

Kaleb groaned. He didn’t even bother sitting back up now. He was too tired to bother, and every time he made a mistake, his body would end up laid out flat anyway, so he decided that this was the best way to avoid any injury or discomfort. Essan had even fetched him a pillow.

Slowly, he began again to fill up each of the pools inside his body. He could still only do this one at a time, which resulted in some of the brevity he experienced holding onto the state – by the time he finished the tenth pool, he was already almost ten minutes deep with the first. The real difficulty of the process was that as he went on, it became more and more difficult to maintain the previous pools, and more difficult to focus on filling the next. It was as if his attention was being divided in ten – which, he supposed, was actually what was happening. He frowned as he got to the fourth. This part was always the easiest. These were the spikes inside the torso, and so he was able to focus on them in a more singular and internal fashion. The same way that there are multiple organs inside the chest, he felt that having multiple areas of charge within it was also possible. The problem came when holding onto the charge in that area while building it up in each arm. He would work on one arm, and then leap over and work on the other. When he had started the process of building his ‘array’ this was always where he fell down, and the whole arrangement would collapse. He just found it extraordinarily difficult to focus on his torso as well as his extremities. It was something he usually did with proprioception rather than thinking about it, but this exercise required focus, and required his active attention.

This time, tired as he was, he suddenly felt himself drop the first pool, and it flowed away quickly. He felt it direct a tiny amount of field energy into a repulsion field, which sent a chair creaking back on its legs. The rest followed suit.

“Gah” he panted “it’s so hard to focus on my arms as well as my body!”

“Hmmm… what is the problem?”

“Well, when I start, I move through the torso initially, but when I try and start on one arm, well I can usually do that, but it is hopping over to the other arm that always seems to lose me.”

“I see… well, you know I don’t know exactly how you’re approaching this exercise, but you could try and do it a different way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, your body is mostly symmetrical, and so is the placement of the spikes in most cases –and in this one we’re trying it is– so you can try and construct two pools of charge at a time on either side of your body. Like a mirror image.”

“Oh. right.”

Kaleb had thought he was constrained in the sense of only being able to act on one thing at a time in his very unschooled manipulation of fields, yet if he could simply mirror the operation, then it might be easier than attempting to do two things at once. That way, rather than co-ordination, one side is simply following along with the other. He reached into his field again, and this time, tried to divide his body with a meridian, and tried to impress into his mind that what occurred on one side would be mirrored in the other. He started, and felt the blossoming of two pools in his chest. He almost lost them in excitement. He could halve the time needed to set up the fake array! He set about working.

By the end of the day, Kaleb could stand while maintaining the ten charge pools. He could move, but only in a highly forced and unnatural way. The focus he was directing towards maintaining the pools led him to be awkward and inattentive to everything, but Erid was happy.

“It’s not like we’ve solved it, but it's enormously better than before, and you know, so long as no one disturbs you, you might actually make it though.” he’d said. “But we might need to stay a few more days if we can work it. You can’t maintain it for half an hour yet, and it will have to be half an hour of moving and some potential interactions.”

Kaleb sighed and collapsed into a seat at the bar.

“Do you really think I can pull this off?”

“Hmmm… it’ll be a challenge.”

Kaleb grimaced. They weren’t exactly the words of encouragement he was looking for

“But don’t worry!” Erid clapped him on the back “this only plan a. There’s always another way.”

“What other way?”

Erid shrugged “take them all out.”