Welcome to Chapter 30! There's some real adolescent humor in this one. I hope you enjoy it!
If you're younger than 18 or find these kinds of stories offensive, please close up now and have a great day! If you are of legal age and are interested, by all means keep going. I'll be glad to have you along for the journey. Please donate to Nifty. This is a great resource for great stories and a useful outlet to authors like me and readers like you.
30
Climbing for Real and a Poplar Tree
"Church, you and me are going to teach you the basics of climbing with a safety rope." Neb announced. "Grab your gloves, don't worry about the shoes. I don't expect to get more than a few feet off the ground today and you need to get used to climbing in the tactical boots you're wearing. Bem, you and Shawn," she pointed a little way across the clearing, "a sanitary trench downwind, then join us. I get the impression Shawn hasn't climbed with ropes before and will need some tutoring as well."
Shawn agreed with genuine enthusiasm. "This is my first real mountain."
Neb went to the van, piled me with an armload of esoteric clips, ropes, a harness, and what-have-you, and led the way to the cliff face. She demonstrated how to get into the harness, how to adjust it properly, and how to set up the rope grips. When she was reasonably certain I understood, she hooked her thumbs in her pants pockets and looked up the rock face. "This is going to be the hardest part. We'll take it for granted that you can get us through the barrier. It's the only way to think about it. If the Steward is right and the barrier is tied to Pravus' life force, he will likely feel us coming through. That doesn't matter much. I expect he'll know we're coming long before that. The worst-case scenario is having to climb a thousand feet of sheer cliff under enemy fire."
The sound of my jaws crunching a nut drew Neb's gaze from the mountain. She watched me float another nut from my revolving solar system to my mouth and one from the bag to replace it and deflated slightly. "Church, I know you need to practice, but I can't talk about life and death with that cloud of nuts swirling next to your head."
I ate another planet and marched the rest of the nuts to the bag. "As I was saying," she resumed, "you could probably protect us with your shield until we got to the top, but it would be a severe load on you and even if the enemy exposed themselves, we couldn't fire back. I've thought about Bem and I riding your elevator up, maybe with a heavy machine gun. It's an option I'd like to be prepared for. I'm tempted to request additional forces from the Steward, but I don't know if they would be useful. A larger force is much harder to manage. I believe a very small team is the right approach here, but I'm not used to going into an operation with so little intel."
Neb shoved her sleeves up, and as usual the right didn't stay up. "The only thing I know to do is plan for the knowns and be ready to improvise for the unknowns. There's a mountain inside that barrier, so we'll prepare to climb a mountain. The secret weapon we have is you. Your strength is a big asset. I want you proficient at climbing, but excellent at magic."
I tugged on the harness straps that ran over my shoulders like an old man snapping his suspenders and recommitted to doing my best. "Just tell me what you need. If it's in my power to give it to you, you'll have it."
Neb patted my upper left arm and nodded a quick, shallow nod. "Good." She pointed to the wall. "I'm not going to give you any advice unless I think you're doing something dangerous. Pick your lane and start up. Take your time and make sure to keep advancing your safety line. If you fall here, it's going to hurt."
I tried to pick a lane with the largest and most frequent holds, though they were much harder to identify now that they weren't color coded like the ones on the artificial mountain at the climbing center. The point wasn't to challenge my climbing prowess, but to figure out how to get up the mountain as quickly and safely as possible. I had to be extra careful as I was the only one that I couldn't save if I fell.
I made a selection and got ready to go up. Shawn and Bem arrived at that moment, their arms full of harnesses and such, and distracted me from my task. I had a flash mental image of Shawn wearing the climbing harness, perhaps only the climbing harness, and shook my head to clear it. That image started my mind down a dangerous path. I reminded myself I was there to climb, faced the wall, and started up. I built a platform for Neb and brought her with me.
I made good progress but got stuck around fifteen feet. I didn't have a handhold in reach and wasn't sure what to do. Neb saw I was at a loss. "Stop and think. Picture the wall in your mind. Did you pass any holds that looked good? If you back up, can you make your way sideways and continue? Backtracking takes time, can you move sideways here? Is there anything else you can do? You're smarter than that rock. You can't match its strength, but you can out-think it."
I tried to move sideways but couldn't. I tried to backtrack but didn't see anything promising. I went back to where I got stuck to reason it out some more. What can I do? I've got a long reach, but that doesn't help if there's nothing to grab. The telekinesis doesn't help. What can I do?' I thought about that question and rearranged it to stress the I.' `What can I do that's unique?' I thought about the white magic that I hadn't used much.
I pointed at the rock where I needed the hold and shot a light at it. I increased the power, a little at a time, until pieces of the rock started to fracture and chip. Neb shielded her eyes but didn't step away. I shoved the power up and hit the wall with a burst. A fist-sized chunk of rock fragmented and fell from the wall. It left a nice, deep hold. I slapped my hand against it to see if it was hot. It wasn't. I swept the loose stone chips from the new hold and locked my hand in it.
Neb congratulated me. "I knew you were smarter than the mountain."
I grinned at her statement because, had it come from someone else, Bem maybe, it would have been teasing. Coming from Neb, I knew it was praise. "I'm gonna take that as a compliment because I don't know how else to take it."
She elaborated. "You didn't get angry at the mountain for making your climb difficult. You tried some things and came up with a solution. Now you've learned something. If you need a hold and one doesn't present itself, you can make one. If a natural hold isn't deep enough, you can make it deeper. It wouldn't be efficient to turn a sheer cliff into a staircase, but your unique solution has made you potentially much faster on the wall."
Her praise felt good. Getting better at something that was so new to me was encouraging. My biggest goal was to get fast enough to keep up with my teammates. I'd never climb with Shawn's grace or run up the wall like Bem, but I didn't have to. I just needed to be fast enough not to slow them down. That seemed an attainable goal.
Neb coached and kept me from going any higher than fifty feet. We focused on reading the wall, using the holds effectively, and not getting tangled in the safety line. I practiced moving up, down, and sideways, and even got my first repelling lesson. Shawn was having his own lesson with Bem and was enjoying the hell out of it. He was excited for the new challenge and risk of a real mountain. His enjoyment helped me feel less like I was at work and more like I was in the middle of an adventure. It was nice.
About three hours in, Neb stopped me. "That's enough for today. We've gone over a lot, and you need some time to process it. Let's go down and work on your magic."
I climbed down and Neb helped me out of the harness. I was leaning against the cliff, unfastening my gloves, when I noticed her watching Bem and Shawn very intently. I was surprised that she didn't seem to be watching analytically. I stuffed the gloves in my back pocket and called a question to her. She didn't answer. I called again.
Neb dragged her eyes down, shoved her sleeves up, and pretended she hadn't heard me. "I didn't catch that."
I leaned flat against the wall and crossed my arms over my chest to grin at her. "I asked where we should go to work on magic, but now I'm much more interested in which of our friends has you distracted."
She raised her eyes back to the wall and answered as frankly as she would answer any question, no shyness at all. "They're both attractive men. Bem is physically very close to my ideal, though his personality wouldn't allow for any more than a casual relationship. Shawn is too big, I don't like large men, but there's something about watching him climb that I find very compelling."
"Poetry of motion." I suggested and kept my gaze on her.
Neb didn't lower her eyes to answer. "That's exactly what it is. He moves so...so..."
"Gracefully." I filled in the word that seemed to elude her.
"Exactly. If you see it to, why aren't you watching?"
"It would be dangerous to him." I explained. My statement was strange enough to Neb to draw her eyes down. I kept going. "I have to be careful not to appreciate him too much. He feels what I feel. If I desire him, he'll feel it. It would distract him, and he could make a mistake. I'm working very hard not to picture him while we're talking like this for that same reason."
"Is it true you can always tell where he is?"
"I can to a point. I know he's about twenty feet up the wall and going up. He's climbing about ten feet to the left of the lane I chose. The farther we are apart, the weaker the link gets. Put enough distance between us, and I won't feel him at all."
"How far?" She asked.
"Not sure. I was in Ars' office at The HALL once and knew he was getting closer when he was still a few blocks away. We haven't tested it but I would guess maybe a half-mile."
"No telepathy?"
"No, thank God. Sharing all his memories and emotions is plenty."
"Sounds like it." Neb agreed and pointed along the cliff toward the woods. She started to walk in that direction. I re-established my nut solar system, started to munch, and fell in step with her. "We'll get away from them, so you don't distract each other." Neb said as we strode along. "I read Preacanto's report on your magic. I also see how much control you have now. That's good, it's good to have fine control, but I'm guessing you haven't pushed yourself power-wise. How much magic have you tried to use?"
"Not much, I think. Back there is only the third time I've used white magic and the heaviest thing I've lifted with the telekinesis was you, Bem, and Shawn at the climbing center."
"Do you have any concept of the amount of power you can control?" Neb asked as she stopped to look around when we got to the tree line.
"Preacanto tried to explain, but I couldn't wrap my head around it. She said I was strong enough to throw The HALL into space."
Neb seemed to find what she was looking for and plunged ahead. "Based on the data from your magic test, all that was collected before you destroyed the equipment, she's almost right. According to the detailed report, you could probably throw The HALL and several more city blocks into space at the same time. I need to know what you can do, but you need to know as well."
I was getting ready to ask Neb what she meant by me needing to know what I could do when she stopped next to a dead tree and looked up at it. "This is a poplar tree." She announced. "Look at it, what do you see?"
I walked around the tree, looked it up and down, and reported what I saw. "White bark, no leaves, seventy or eighty feet tall, branches reach about fifty feet from tip to tip, no exposed roots, no insect damage, trunk is about three feet thick; it's a big goddamned tree."
Neb scanned the area again, picked out the largest living tree near us, and went to stand next to it. I followed. She pointed at the poplar. "I want you to pull that tree out of the ground."
I thought she was kidding. "I can't..."
She held her hand up for silence. "You can and you will. We'll do it together. Come over here with me, this tree should protect us if anything goes wrong. Concentrate on the poplar, wrap your power around it."
I concentrated on the tree and reached out to it with my magic. I felt it spread around the trunk and up through the branches. Through my power, I could feel the rough bark and could tell by the texture that, even though the tree was dead, it wasn't yet brittle. Wrapping my magic around something as big as the tree and being able to feel it was wild. I thought about the different parts; the trunk, the individual branches, the pockmarks where the leaves once grew. I could feel each piece with finger-tip sensitivity, but not all at once. I wanted to explore the sensations, but Neb was waiting, so I cut my exploration short. "I have it." I announced.
"Pull straight up, then. Don't jerk it. I don't want you to snap it off. Just pull until it comes loose."
I gave myself a half-assed pep talk. She thinks you can do this. Maybe she's right.' I concentrated hard and started to pull. The rough bark dug into my magic like a course stick would dig into the flesh of my hands. The tree seemed so big; the task felt like it was impossible. I pulled, but nothing moved. I started to doubt. Suddenly, confidence came from nowhere to swell in my chest. No,' I thought, `I can do this.'
I added more power and started to feel the magic flow from my core. It wasn't as intense as the day of the magic test at The HALL, but the feeling was unmistakable. It felt great. I chased the positive feeling and added more power to the effort. The ground around the tree showed the first signs of something happening. The dead leaves and dirt started to shift. I felt the tree move a little, then a little more. I pulled harder. Subterranean roots snapped and popped as the tree came loose. I lifted it, and its giant root ball, all the way out of the ground and hovered it three feet above the surface. I was amazed at the accomplishment.
"How do you feel?" Neb asked.
"Good."
"Magic stable?"
"Yes."
"Is it heavy?"
I wasn't sure how to answer that one, and I had to think about it. I hefted the tree with my power and tried to judge how heavy it felt. "It's like carrying a gallon of milk. It's more than a pencil, but nowhere near a strain."
Neb walked around the floating tree and stared at it. I floated a nut to my mouth and crunched on it. The sound caught her attention. "You're still eating?" She asked incredulously.
"I'm hungry." I shrugged and ate another nut.
She shook her head in disbelief and looked back at the tree. "I didn't realize so much dirt would come up with the roots. Can you leave the roots and keep the tree?"
I thought about how to separate the tree from its roots. I had an idea to snap it with my telekinesis, but when I tried, I couldn't get a firm hold on the root ball. It was too soft. I decided to try the white magic again. For safety's sake, I had Neb get behind me first. I turned my right hand flat, palm down, fingers together, and pictured a five-foot long blade of energy coming from my fingertips. It appeared as I imagined it, a glowing white sword. I lowered the tree, so the root ball was almost all the way back in the ground, and used my sword to slice the trunk off just above the dirt. The magic went through the wood like a hot knife, cutting cleanly and silently. The only sound was the soft thud of the root ball settling back in place.
I released the white magic but kept my hold on the tree. "Now what?" I asked.
"Can you take it to the clearing?"
"Sure." I started raising the tree to get it above the canopy when Neb called out to stop me.
"Wait, where are Shawn and Bem?"
"Shawn is almost on the ground. I don't know about Bem."
"If you can, give Shawn time to get to the ground. I don't want to surprise him with a flying tree when he's on the wall."
I waited a few minutes until I knew Shawn was safely on the ground. "He's down." I announced and lifted the tree straight up. I floated it away from us so we wouldn't be walking under it. I knew I wouldn't drop it, but my construction training kicked in and reminded me to never walk under a load.
Neb watched the tree float from sight and seemed to panic slightly. "You can keep it up without looking at it?" She demanded.
I put my face in Neb's and crunched a nut to tease her a little. I tried to explain so she'd understand how certain I was of my hold on the tree. "I feel it with my power like I'm holding it in my hand."
That explanation seemed to placate her, and we walked to the clearing. The tree kept pace, coming into view when we exited the woods. "Where do you want it?" I asked like I was helping her in with the groceries instead of supporting a gigantic fucking poplar tree with magic power.
"Put it next to camp." She instructed, just as simply. "We'll use it for firewood."
I turned the tree sideways and sent it across the clearing. I felt Shawn's emotions go into high gear when he saw it. He was shocked, then amazed, then impressed, then aroused. The last one caught me off guard, but it was a nice change of pace to have him aroused instead of terrified by a display of my power. I set the tree down twenty feet outside of camp and turned around. Shawn and Bem approached. Bem's eyes were so wide, I saw white all the way around his cobalt irises. Shawn wore a bedroom look that smoldered on his face and in my mind. He took my right hand in both of his and said something that was supposed to be just for us. "If they weren't here, I'd be tearing your clothes off."
Unfortunately for me, Shawn had underestimated Bem's hearing. "Don't let us stop you! I'm with Shawn, that was hot as fuck! For a guy with lackluster equipment, you wield some big wood! I mean, look at the size of that wood! It looks so thick and heavy and rigid!"
"BEM!" Neb barked. "It's enough."
"No problem." Bem grinned. "I had more but they weren't as good."
She ignored him. "How hard was that?" Neb grimaced, whirled on Bem, and shouted, "DON'T!"
Bem's wide grin told me she stopped his comments about `hard wood' just in time. Neb brought her attention back to me. "How difficult was that? Did you feel like you were near your limit?"
"No. I could have done much more."
"How much more?" She asked.
I shrugged helplessly. "I just don't know. Go back to the gallon of milk. It weighs eight pounds. I'm capable of putting an eighty-pound bag of cement on each shoulder and carrying them as far as I need to. That's a strain, but not a struggle. Ten trees that size, twenty maybe. Maybe more."
Neb nodded like she understood my problem of quantifying my strength. "We'll have to come up with something else. I want to test the limits of your magic, but I don't want to destroy the woods to do it." She pointed at camp. "Would you strip the branches and..."
Bem couldn't contain himself. "Ooooohhhhh, Church, are you going to manscape your wood?"
We all laughed, even Neb. She's tried to scowl but couldn't stay serious. Bem was nuts and he was funny. He still frustrated me with his constant penis comments, but I couldn't be mad when I was laughing. Neb tried one last time. "Church, do you know what I want?"
I saluted...poorly. "Stripped, split, sorted, and stacked."
"Yes, please." She agreed.
I gave her a thumbs up and headed for camp. Shawn went with me. "Is your climbing lesson over?" I asked.
"It is, but even if it wasn't, I wouldn't miss this for anything."
I still felt a current of arousal flowing from him and asked him about it. "Is this really making you hot?"
"Oh, yes. Is that strange? You like watching me move my body."
"Yes, but I'm hot for your body. How can you be hot for my magic?"
He threw his left arm across my back, his hand barely reaching my left shoulder. "It's not the magic. It's knowing all that magic is pent up inside this body."
"Like watching a body builder flex?" I asked.
"Kind of, yes."
I accepted Shawn's explanation and stopped us several yards from the tree so I could make him stand behind me for his safety. I picked the tree up and re-established the white magic blade. Shawn's emotions ran through a similar line up of surprise to arousal when he saw the white light emitting from my hand. I used it to slice the branches from the trunk. I cut four two-foot-tall sections off the bottom of the trunk and set them aside. I cut another twenty feet from the trunk and set the resulting log against some trees at the tree line to stack the firewood against.
I cut the remaining the bare trunk in eighths long ways and sliced it again in two-foot sections. I stacked the pieces in cords against the log. I sliced the branches up like I was chopping a pile of parsley, then sorted the kindling from the larger wood without too much attention to detail and piled these separately next to the cords.
Shawn and I walked to the cliff-wall under the ramp that led from the gate to the valley floor and collected rocks. I drove these into the ground in a circular pattern as a fire ring. I took the four round pieces of tree trunk I'd set aside and set them around the stone ring as four seats. I piled some kindling into the ring and lit it with my Zippo. By the time Neb and Bem came back from seeing to the climbing gear, I had a nice fire going.
Shawn's admiration of the process was becoming an issue. His arousal was making me hot to the point of needing to sit down. I longed to touch him, but knew he'd be off limits until we got home in four days. Lack of privacy aside, I was a sweaty mess from climbing and so was he. In four days, I'd stink like a garbage dump at low tide. That didn't stop my fantasies though. The problem of my smoldering arousal distracted me for the rest of the afternoon and through dinner. It was so bad that I picked two meals at random and wound up with one meal that was chicken breast and buttered noodles, not my favorite, and another one that was an eggs and sausage breakfast that must have slipped into the wrong crate.
I didn't hear much of the conversation around the table until Shawn asked Bem and Neb if either of them wanted to bathe first. Bem was in the middle of expressing his preference for all of us bathing together when I zoomed in on what Shawn said. "Bathe where?" I asked.
"Oh, the waterfall is as warm as bathwater. It falls in a very private space eroded in the stone. It's like a big stone hot tub."
Neb stood from the table. "I will go first, then Bem, then we will give Shawn and Church some privacy." She eyed Bem when she said the word `privacy.'
Bem was wearing the unconvincing innocent face again as he said, "why do you look at me that way? I haven't peeped on anyone in at least a week."
Neb went to the tent she shared with Bem to gather what she needed to clean up. I'd originally been a little surprised about Neb and Bem sharing a tent, guys and girls together and all, but the attitudes on Solum didn't seem to treat women as something that needed to be protected. I also assumed that, since both Bem and Neb were special forces, Neb could easily defend herself against any of Bem's advances that she might consider unwanted. I figured that, as I was the only one who seemed surprised, the two of them sharing a tent was a cultural difference between Earth and Solum, and not an issue to anyone but me.
I might have thought about it some more, but I noticed Bem had remained at the table to grin at us. The look on his face, forced innocence and something else, was disturbing enough for me to focus on. I knew that he was plotting, and I was back and forth in my head as to what to do about it. Out of respect for the way he'd been direct with me about his intentions, I tried to match his approach with my own directness. "Bem, I am a very private person, and I embarrass easily. I would appreciate if you would let Shawn and I bathe in peace. Please."
The way he pouted in response to my request told me I was fucked. "I can't believe you'd suggest I would try to embarrass you. I'm hurt."
I devised a new tactic to deal with Bem, got Shawn's attention, and asked him a leading question. "If he peeps, and I emasculate him with white magic, could you fix him?"
Shawn, who doesn't get sarcasm, answered literally. "Of course."
"Would it work the way it did before?"
"It should, but there's always a chance." Shawn hedged his answer. He was being honest, but he managed to say exactly what I needed him to say. "I've never had to put someone's genitalia back on."
I glared at Bem and jerked my head toward Shawn. "He's reasonably sure he can fix it. Is that good enough for you, my very horny friend?"
"I'll be good." Bem squeaked, the false innocence on his face replaced with what I took to be fear.
"I appreciate that." I shook Bem's hand across the table and considered the matter closed. I still had every intention of setting up a barrier around Shawn and me, but I hoped I'd scared Bem enough to make it unnecessary.