Chapter Four

It has been eight brutal months of training. Dr. Minton seemed so nice, but that was before I had him for a task master. Starting before sunrise, he had me practicing water manipulation for two hours. Randomly alternating between large, brute force tasks and incredibly detailed models sculpted in anything from bowls to puddles on the street. His favorite motto? If you aren't sweating by the end and having trouble focusing, then you haven't worked hard enough. Heaven forbid he catch you slacking, or else you get to be subjected to his stamina course over the weekend. His first, and apparently easiest, stamina course starts out with a seemingly simple five gallon bucket. Step one, fill the bucket. From atmospheric water. Then form a pillar two feet higher than the rim of the bucket, and on top of that he wants a miniature couple dancing. Oh, nothing fancy, a simple waltz will do. Keep the pillar stable, can't let your mind wander. If you do, he has a lovely willow switch he cut that morning on the way over to provide incentive on the back of your forearm. He also manages to inexplicably hit the exact same spot on your arm. Every. Damn. Time. It took me three tries to get this far.

Just as soon as you have that managed, he rotates the bucket around so you can see a spigot on the back end. Who the hell puts a spigot on a damn bucket? Why? You can just dump it out. Unless you are a sadistic trainer hell bent on coming up with cruel punishments for your students. Keep the people dancing on their pedestal while making sure nothing flows out through the wide open spigot. Sick of trying to divide my attention three ways, I thought I would get creative and make a block of ice inside the spigot to stop the flow. The cruel smile from there heralded a whole new level of hell. Apparently my reward for showing initiative was more work. Now, Dr. Minton is a rather accomplished waterbrand himself. The next portion of my training involved fighting off his attempts to disrupt my training. Sometimes he would flatten the dancers. Pare away the pillar while trying to force water through the spigot faster. His favorite was to shoot a stream of water from the pillar right at my face. I vowed never to play poker with him either. He gave nothing away. No twitch, excess blinking, he could be looking anywhere. There was no pattern either.

I will admit, as horrendous as these stamina practices were, they were also incredibly effective. Once I could fill the bucket in under a minute, we graduated to a pool. A 5,000 gallon swimming pool. As soon as I figured out that I could conjure anywhere above the pool and not just the area of a bucket, My time dropped drastically. Originally 16 hours of mind numbing repetition fell to under four. That's when the informative lessons came in.

"Larry, you have both incredible stamina, unparalleled willpower, and amazing fine detail control. That is the best combination of traits in a waterbrand. The only thing that can hold you back is your imagination on what is possible and what isn't. To that end, I will not tell you anything isn't possible for fear of crippling you. Trust in yourself and your strength, and know I look forward to all the advances you will make in our field."

After morning practice, I had just under two hours to get cleaned up and prepared for classes at the university. Diagnosing was intriguing. Most cases were presented with a small list of symptoms, then the class took turns trying to pinpoint the problems. Every person there had something they were naturally competent at, but the instructors took pains to make sure nobody was complacent. Personally, I excelled at blood sensing. Probably a side effect of having spent countless hours studying the vascular system in my world, knowing where blood should be flowing and how much gave me a huge advantage. One of the class leaders, Ben, excelled at musculature while twins Glenda and Gloria (poor girls) were the best with organs. Even though it made me seem stand offish, I tried my best to keep everyone at arm's length. I didn't want to know these people, didn't want to make any connections that could be used against me on my project later. It was best that way, for them and for me.

Surprisingly, the leader with the nervous system was a quiet mouse of a woman named Carmen, who was one of the weakest strength wise. Finding myself early for class once, I sat down in the back next to her with every intention of picking her brain. "So Carmen, you are hands down the best with nerves and nerve manipulation. Any tips on what I could do to improve?"

Startling at the sound of my voice, her head flashed up to stare at me for a second, then back down to intently study the grains of wood in her desk. "Um, hi Larry." she responded so quietly I had to strain to hear her. Calmly putting my hand on top of hers, she looked at me wide eyed and panicked.

"Please, just calm down. Take a deep breath, hold it for two seconds, and let it out slowly. I know you're painfully shy. I'm not going to pressure you, just relax and talk to me when you are ready. Until then, I will face forward." Removing my hand and turning away, I gave her a minute to collect herself. Listening to her rustling papers trying to calm down, I slouched down and closed my eyes, content to wait as long as it took.

"Subtlety. How often will an elephant realize it just walked through a spiders web? With all the strength you guys at the top have, you act just like elephants stomping through to do something. Sometimes less is more. Especially with something like nerves. Or even something as simple as keeping a patient asleep. Tell me, when you try and sleep, do you turn the radio on as loud as possible?"

Wow, I think that was the most I had ever heard her say at one time. I would have to find some way to thank her for that advice, doubly so if it ended up working. Turning my head just enough to see her from the corner of my eye, I gave her a smirk. "Well, that's an incredibly useful bit of advice there. I guess this elephant is going to have to learn how to tip toe around. Thanks, and if there's anything I can do to help you out, just let me know." Blushing, she just turned away. Yeah, something simple and anonymous for a thanks would be best.

My conversation with Carmen got me thinking about what I could do to train myself. Doctor Minton had me practicing delicate work, but I never had to think about power regulation. Carmen's comment about spider webs seemed like a great place to start. Not wanting to disturb any arachnids, and thinking this would be vastly different than my morning training, I decided on a path for my evening practice. In the bath tub, I started by creating a spider web out of ice. Or at least, that was the plan. No matter how I started, I ended up with shards in the bottom of the tub. I tried creating the web with water first then freezing it to no avail. Growing the web from the side of the tub worked a little better, until I got to the first fork. Then it all fell apart again. I spent the better part of a month getting frustrated and not really moving forward at all, wishing for an epiphany. It finally came when we had a guest lecturer. To my surprise, it was Jane from the police department. I tried paying attention to her lecture about how long it is safe to keep someone asleep, but in the end kept going back to our first meeting. Visualization worked then, perhaps it could help me again?

That night I got home and spent the first half hour simply meditating before trying anything. When I got as relaxed as possible, I imagined looking inside my head. There, I could see a glowing well of power. For the first experiment, I merely conjured a small stream of water into the tub. Immediately an arm diameter rope of luminescent blue shot out of the well and out to where I assumed the water was being conjured. Now, I needed to find an adjustable nozzle to determine just how much of my energy came flying out of the well. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I imagined a nozzle with an adjustable angle on the well and tried it. Sure enough, the rope thinned down into a cable as thick as a finger. Elated, I opened my eyes while trying to keep the mental imagery intact. Setting up a web of water, I tried freezing it only to watch it shatter time and again.

Damnit, this should be working! What am I doing wrong? Going back into my head, I relaxed the nozzle and stuck my hand into the rope of energy. Weird, I could feel it "flowing" around my hand. Almost like a kitchen faucet that was mostly open. Okay, let's try this with the cable sized flow. Tightening down the nozzle *OW SON OF A BISCUIT* yanking my hand out of the stream I stood there shaking it to get feeling back. That was going a lot faster than the rope was. Damn, no wonder my stuff was still shattering. I wasn't dialing back on the amount of power at all, I was just constricting it. Ask anyone who works with pipes for a living, if you just go from a larger diameter to a smaller, you still get the same amount of water flowing it just increases the pressure. I needed a way to keep the flow the same, but take out less energy. Going from a smaller diameter pipe to a larger one seemed inefficient, plus there was no guarantee that the thicker rope I pulled on wouldn't have the same flow as the smaller one.

I could try and build something like a faucet, but something variable like that just wouldn't help. Besides, I didn't really know exactly how a faucet worked. Guess it's time to wing it and hope for the best. Imagine a giant reservoir, with one main line heading in from my well of power, filling it up from the bottom. At the top of the reservoir is an exit for the power to flow to wherever I needed it to. Now I just needed some way to bleed out excess power without wasting it. Around the base of my reservoir, I created five different drainage pipes, all converging back into my well of power. Each one had a simple on/off valve. If I needed full power, I could theoretically leave all five closed. If I needed a lot less power, opening all of them should leave me with 1/6 of my normal power output without any power loss since all the excess was simply recycled into my source. Just in case, I put a T junction in all the pipes leading back to the source with an end valve like a fire hydrant. You never know when you will need multiple lines of power, and having the time to fine tune problems before you need it could be the difference between life and death.

Opening the valve into the reservoir, I watched it fill before I took a stream out and started conjuring water. Still rope like, it behaved exactly as it should have. Ok, time for the first split valve. The split stream moved back into the source exactly as expected. Unfortunately the conjuring stream cut off entirely. What the hell? Looking at the drainage feed, I realized my mistake. I had made all the drains the same as the output. Back to the drawing board. Rather than trying to fix the bugs with the reservoir system, I went back to basics. Ok, start with a pipe coming out of the source. Take that pipe, and add on a six way split. One split continued on in the original direction and had the same diameter as the original pipe, and we can end it with a shutoff valve. The five remaining pipes were all smaller than the original. This time I wanted to do some math beforehand. Remembering back to all those lovely physics lectures, energy has to be conserved. So if I split my flow, the sum of the resulting flows will be equal to the original. Also, the flow is determined by the cross sectional area, so if I cut the radius of the pipe by two, the flow is cut by four. My main power line was roughly four inches in diameter. Since the area is π times the radius squared, I decided to make my life a little easier and drop the π from all calculations. So my radius was two, square it to get an area of four. Of the smaller branches, I made three of them two inch diameter and two of them one inch diameters. Each of the areas for the larger splits would be one, while each of the smaller splits would be 1/4. So even if I had all the valves open, 3 1/2 would be diverted back to the source while still leaving me 1/2 to work with, or 1/8 of my maximum energy output. The variable pipe split sizes gave me plenty of room to experiment with different amounts of power. Since I still wanted to try multiple streams of power, on all the pipes heading back to the source I put another split in with a simple diverter. Both splits were the same size as the original pipe, and the diverter determined which pipe the stream entered. One went back to the source, the other came out for my use. Think of a split with train tracks. The train can only go one way or the other, depending on which way the switch is set up.

Now that I had that set up, time for testing. Closing all the splits, I had the normal flow of energy before setting any of this stuff up. Opening one of the larger split pipes, I was thrilled when my output dropped from full to 3/4 energy, and I got a corresponding drop in conjured water. I tried it with all the pipes open, and it still worked perfectly! Success! The conjured stream had dropped to a steady dribble, and all my energy was flowing back to my source without any waste! Ok, let's see if I can manage multiple streams at once. Triggering one of the switches on the larger pipes, I easily directed it to conjure a second stream right next to the original. Beautiful! Suddenly thankful for all those lessons in managing multiple tasks at once with Dr. Minton's stamina training, I was ecstatic. Keeping up both flows, I used one to conjure and hold a spider web of water while the other froze it in place. While this time I actually got everything to freeze, there were still several areas that I could see visible cracks in the final product. Well, this just won't do unless I have perfection, or as close to it as I can get before the massive headache I feel coming on lays me out flat. Perhaps I was still using too much power? I switched things around so that the major stream was still conjuring and holding a spider web of water in place, but I was using the smallest pipe I had to freeze it in place. Fighting off my impending pain, I finally managed to achieve it. There, hanging from the edges of my bathtub, was a spider web of pristine ice. I barely managed to get my mental pipe imagery firmly seated before my nose started gushing blood. Grabbing a nearby towel, I decided to call it quits. I'm truly glad I didn't know how soon this new skill would be incredibly important.