Chapter 10

After getting back from seeing Phillip buried, I immersed myself in work. I also had discovered I was being bugged, again. This time I just started destroying the bugs as I found them. It was really annoying me. As a result, I had a lawyer start proceedings to sue the town of Clinton for its abuse of me, during my visit.

I was falling apart. I was getting angry, and doing things that I really shouldn't. I was letting my feelings get the better of me, something Markus had told me (and on occasion beat into me) as a child, not to do. As a result, I took my displeasure out on Clinton, Nebraska.

I was smoking more than I usually did. My early morning jogs were becoming a bit harder to do, what with the host of watchers I had accumulated. Despite the warnings, and what I had done to Lauder and his bunch of NSA assholes, officialdom was still on my ass.

I had to do something, but what? I pondered this at my desk, and drank the coffee that Vivian had made in the office coffee maker. I sighed. I needed a vacation, or to get away, or something. I nodded to myself. I was going to close down the office for a while.

I had to go somewhere quiet, and calm myself. I needed to get away from all this 'being watched'. It had my nerves on edge, and I was starting to react, instead of think.

I went downstairs and saw my landlord. I wrote him a check for the rest of the year, telling him I was closing my office, and taking some time off.

I went back upstairs, and talked to Viv. I had assumed it was going to be hard telling her I was closing down. Particularly, since I could not say for how long. She was a lot more understanding than I had anticipated. Since I had not yet replaced Phillip, it was just Vivian and I.

Vivian lived alone, in a house she had inherited from her mother. It was small, and was the house she had grown up in. It was paid off, and she didn't really have that much in the way of bills. I paid Viv 2,000.00 a month. She was well worth it to me. I gave her a check for three months salary, as severance, and told her that I would get in touch when I came back.

I drove out to my house, and phoned to cancel the gas and electric, as of the first of the month. I paid through to that date with a credit card, and told them I would resume service, when I returned from my extended trip.

I cast several maintenance spells on the place, to keep the pipes from bursting, the roof from leaking, etc.

I checked in with my lawyer to see how the case with Clinton was going. He told me that they were offering three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He was sure he could get it up to at least a million, possibly more.

I told him to settle at half a million. I said I would call from time to time, to see how it was going, as I could not tell him where I would be at any given time as I would be moving around. I also canceled my newspaper, and had the post office hold my mail until further notice, starting the first of the month.

All this still gave me a little time to figure out what I wanted to do. I changed, and went out for a run. Running always cleared my head, and it didn't take a lot of my attention, so I was free to think my way through problems.

I was halfway through my run, when it hit me! The gate I had destroyed in Clinton! It showed me what was missing from the gate in Colorado, that Markus had shut down. I now had a pattern with which to start.

Everything worked off of patterns. Life was a pattern. The world was a collection of patterns. Magic was a way of imposing a pattern that was not... natural... onto a situation or place. So it was called magic. Magic was just imposing your will, or a new pattern, on a situation or place that had no such pattern until you created it.

You changed the current pattern into what it was that you wanted. Magic. It was hard to explain magic. When you first start out, you are given chants and spells that work. This trains your mind. If you get good, you don't need chants, spells, or anything else to do magic.

The gate in Colorado had been dead. It's pattern had not been there. But the FOCUS had been! I just hadn't had any idea of what a gate pattern looked like! Now I had a pattern. I already knew what the focus of the pattern I wanted, was! I could get home!

The focus would sort of tune the pattern to a specific place. That was what the visualizations were for. As you built the 'pattern', you also 'focused' on the outer focal points that established the pattern. Markus never had taught me how to do gate patterns. It was always: 'later'.

I was so excited by this revelation, that I didn't bother with my watchers. I even waved cheerfully at the spots where I knew they were, or at the cameras. I felt buoyed, and filled with new energy. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to build a gate, and go visit my homeworld!

The feeling of tightness in my chest, and the gloom that had been on me for the past few weeks, seemed to melt away as I finished my run. I actually felt much better. I hadn't known I was affecting myself to this degree, with my worries. I would have to keep a closer watch over my feelings in the future.

Now all I had to figure out, was if I created the gate here, would it still take me to that alternate place from which I had entered this world. In other words, did distance in this world equate to distance in that world, or could I impose a pattern that would take me to where I wanted to go? That was a good question.

If I did all the focal points correctly, and build the pattern for the gate from that, would I come out hundreds of miles from where I wanted to be? What would I find on the other side? Would I be in my family's area, or in an enemy held area? Who had won, over there?

These were good questions, and I would have to think them out before I did the construction of the gate. What would I need? I remembered the clothing of the time. It had been similar to the clothing of the mid 1800's of this world. How had that other world changed? Was time going at the same rate as here? There was so much I didn't know. I was starting to feel angry with Markus, all over again. He always refused to talk of our home world.

Ok. I would take it one question at a time. I quickly made a list of possible equipment to take with me. As the list progressed, I found it wasn't as simple as I thought it would be, and the questions just got more numerous.

Had my home world advanced in technology as this world had? I just didn't know. Would a car, or truck, be ok over there, or should I take a horse? What did they use for money? For the life of me, I could not remember ever holding money over there. I would have to be careful when I went.

Two weeks later, saw me pulling off the highway at the exit for Roanoke Island, North Carolina. The place had a history of an entire colony going missing in the 1600's. If what I thought was true, then it was possible that the colonials had slipped through a gate. If so, then it would be much easier to create a gate here, than start from scratch, elsewhere.

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