Chapter 5

"The storage place is ready for you to try it out," Storm Who Walks announced with some glee. It was almost as if it had been his idea, the way he was so anxious for Fire Bringer to try it out. "All you have to do is think of the item moving to storage, and it will do so. All you have to do to retrieve an item is to think of it being removed from storage. Try it out with one of your rocks."

Fire Bringer imagined a rock he had been working on moving into the storage place. He was not sure that he was doing it correctly, but he must have been doing something right because the rock he had in mind suddenly disappeared with a puff of air moving into the space that the rock had occupied. He was rather pleased with himself, so he imagined that the rock was returned to its former place on the pile of rocks. Another puff of air and there it was! That worked great, now for more experimentation.

Fire Bringer imagined that the whole pile of rocks was moved into storage at once. WHOOSH! A lot of air moved that time and the whole pile of rocks disappeared. Now came the hard part. He imagined that only one of the rocks was returned to a spot at his feet. PUFF! Only one rock was waiting at his feet for his further pleasure. One more test was needed.

He picked up the rock with TP and moved it, instead of throwing it, to a spot about 400 yards away and 50 yards in the air. He held it there for a moment and then sent it a heating command. For practical purposes, the rock exploded instantly and sprayed the ground with a rain of rock shards moving at high velocity, and this was accompanied by a major pressure wave, and a sound loud enough to deafen anyone near by who was not killed by the force of the explosion or by one of the rock shards.

Several other questions were prompted by this last experiment. The major one was how much of an explosion, etc. would be generated by rocks of different sizes. He spent the rest of the morning trying out rocks of different sizes to get an idea of what he could expect from each size. He was able to get small pops like he could get from a small firecracker, and he was able to get major explosions like he would get from a keg of gunpowder, all just from selecting the proper size of the rock he blew up. This was heady stuff! All he needed was the right kind of rock of the proper size.

The right kind of rock brought up another question, would any limestone from any source produce the same size explosion from the same size rock. There was only one way to find out. Storm Who Walks helped Fire Bringer to locate limestone from several different, widely separated sites. He used TP to bring in samples and shaped some more of the 6-inch pieces he was most familiar with. Experiments with these rocks showed that there was some variation with the degree of explosiveness among the rocks, depending on where they had come from, but the variation was not really enough to make a significant difference. For practical purposes, as a bomb, limestone was limestone, and Fire Bringer did not have to worry about the petty details.

All of this practice with making limestone bombs had made him quite expert in handling his TK ability in applying just the right amount of force to do a particular job. As a result, he had not only made a large number of bombs of different sizes, but he had learned to have a delicate control over his TK ability. Ah, two for the price of one, what more could Fire Bringer ask for?

It was time for lunch, so Fire Bringer decided to have hot coffee with his Cheese sandwich. Thinking about fixing a sandwich made Fire Bringer think about the bread that came from the bakery near his old home in Philadelphia. His mouth started to water at that thought, so he tried out his TP at long distance. Fire Bringer visualized the bakery's interior in a much detail as he could resurrect, and the harder he tried, the more he could remember. He suddenly realized that he had an exact picture of the bakery, but there was something wrong! The baker was the same man as he remembered, but he looked a bit older, and he was dressed a little differently than he had been the last time Fire Bringer visited the store.

"Storm Who Walks, why am I seeing the bakery in Philadelphia differently from when I was there the last time?"

"Because you are seeing it as it is now. You have just tapped into another of your new skills, that of Far Seeing. I had not expected to teach you that for another few months, but you have discovered it all by yourself. I am truly impressed."

"Will this Far Seeing work for anyplace I want to use it, or do I have to stick to places I have already been?"

"The Far Seeing will work for any place that you can think of. It will even work for you to see the other side of the moon, if you want to. There is no distance limit, but you have to pick a place to see, you cannot yet just let your Far Seeing roam at random, it requires direction from your conscious mind. One day, you may have the capacity for random viewing, but not for now; you will have to mature some more before you can do that."

"OK, no problem. I was just curious. Can I take a loaf of bread and leave some money in its place?"

"Yes, but I recommend that you do it so that it is not noticed. You should not attract attention to yourself at this stage of your development."

"I'll just take a loaf when nobody is looking and drop the penny in the till. That should prevent the detection you think I should avoid."

"Yes, that will be satisfactory. I am also glad that your sense of fair play has made you realize that you should pay for anything you take; otherwise, that would be the same as stealing."

"Well, I am no thief! I can always get gold when I need it directly from the ground, can't I?"

"Yes, there are many gold deposits around the world that are unknown to anybody. You can tap one of those without doing any harm, especially if you go so deep that no one else could get to it, anyway."

Fire Bringer picked up his loaf of bread and paid for it. For the fun of it, he used his TK to cut two slices before putting the rest of the bread into his special storage place. Storm Who Walks assured him that it would stay fresh if stored there. A couple of slices of cheese completed the sandwich, but it was a little dry. "Next time, I'll see if I can get one of those wonderful sandwiches from the Jewish delicatessen farther down the block."

Storm Who Walks laughed at that thought. "Already, you are learning some of the perks of the super hero trade."

"Something just occurred to me. There is no reason for me to camp out every night. I can spend the night in a hotel room and eat all of my meals at restaurants, couldn't I?"

"Yes, you can do that if you want to. I had not suggested it, since I thought you enjoyed camping out."

"Well, camping is fun for a short time, but it is something that I could get very tired of as a steady diet. I will need money to do that, so I had better collect some gold. Do you have any suggestions?"

"Just a moment ... There is a place under the mountains in Nevada where there is a gold vein so deep that it is very unlikely that anybody will ever find it. It's about 13 miles deep, so no human is ever likely to find it, much less dig down to it, so I suggest you tap that source for your gold.

"I also suggest that you bring it out and melt it into small bars which you can sell at an assay office in California without raising suspicion."

Fire Bringer spent the afternoon learning how to "mine" gold and sell it. By dark, he had 20 double eagles and some smaller change. He cleaned up his camp and TPed himself and his horse and mule to the edge of a town he had visited before. He rode to a likely looking livery stable and left his animals and his goods there while he found a hotel room and a place to eat.

After supper, Fire Bringer wandered into a saloon and bought a small beer. He didn't plan to drink it, he just wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible. He took a seat at a wall and idly read the minds of some of the more interesting looking patrons.