For the next week he spent most of his free time making up field copies, which oddly enough kept his instructors happy, so he didn't even have to do out of class work for any of them. Kolb made him run and practice every day for two hours, but that wasn't new or anything.
On the sixth day a rare spring time freeze happened, catching everyone off guard. It wasn't just chilly, the ground actually froze solid outside, a bitter cold that made it hard to sleep, even under thick blankets, filled the rooms. The fires could be started down on the lowest levels, but by the time his and Rolph's room warmed up, it probably wouldn't be even cold anymore. The school wasn't even going to bother with it, figuring that it would be largely wasted effort.
Could he use a field device for that? It would have to be huge, but…
Tor started drawing up the plans. Halfway through he started laughing. Couldn't he just reverse the process in the summer and cool down a house or room as well? The idea was simple enough, pull heat from the ground, deep down where it was warm, when cold weather came and then do the opposite in hot weather, which should keep everything roughly in balance in the ground over time even. He smiled. It shouldn't even be that hard. That was basically how he'd built the shield to defeat extreme heat after all, so he already kind of knew what to do.
Two days later, still incredibly cold outside, he hit the warming sigil and waited, the room grew toasty, and then after a few hours, almost too warm. He turned it off to see what would happen. The heat left slowly, just like from a fire. Unlike a fire, the whole room was warm, no cold spot by the door particularly or along the back wall away from the fire. Heh. Worked.
Later that night everyone came to his and Rolph's room to hang out, mainly to talk business. Sara jokingly asked him to marry her when he explained the field to them. He laughed, but no one else did. Trice shook her head, arms crossing playfully, then looking directly at her friend.
“Sorry Sara, I saw him first. Anyway, how many of these can you get going by tomorrow?”
The answer varied, based on how much sleep he'd be willing to do without. The answer that satisfied everyone was twenty. Sara acted like even that was nearly impossible, but it wouldn't be that hard, maybe taking three or four hours, tops. The girls waited while he made the first batch, each of them taking one and putting it in their coat pockets when he had them done. Sara pulled the rest of them to take with her and urged him to start the next batch, which she'd be back for in the morning, she promised.
Rolph stayed quiet and mercifully didn't tease him about the girls mocking him earlier about marriage like that, after they left, allowing him to get right back to work. He turned his light off so that the other boy could sleep and finished an hour before midnight. As long as he didn't toss and turn, he could get nearly eight hours sleep before he had to be up in the morning for meditations. Yay. That had worked out at least. It was a lot easier to sleep in a warm room than freezing cold.
The next morning Sara came for the next batch just before he had to go to breakfast, the girl didn't follow him, having promised the heating and cooling plates to some of her friends already. Well, at least they'd all sleep warm that night. He didn't really think about anything but school work for a while after that, except for making incremental shield improvements. He came up with a breathing tube function that would let him go underwater at least a bit. He still got wet, but air went into his mouth and nose as long as he didn't go deeper than three feet. At that depth he couldn't force his lungs to draw the air in for some reason, it felt like the air just wasn't thick enough. Not that he planned on trying that anytime soon, but it was nice to know he could if someone managed to throw him in the pond.
It wasn't until a few weeks later, when Kolb presented him with his next assignment of “insane combat giant” building that things really started to get shaken up. Sara had collected the templates and sent them off to her mother, so his personal copy work had ended for the time being. She gave out a lot of the fields he'd made to people at the school, which didn't bother him at all really. If they could use them, why shouldn't people have them? Tor didn't get the whole pretending they were being sold thing himself, maybe that was just a game rich people played or maybe Sara wasn't as good at selling things as she pretended? It left him more time for Kolb's new project, which was something that he'd never even thought of before.
“Wait… You want me to make it so a man can fly?”
The weapons instructor just nodded as if it wasn't a totally crazy idea. People didn't fly, did they? Could they?
“It can be done, the Austrans do it all the time. In fact their ability to move people by air is pretty much the only thing that lets them really challenge us in direct conflict. They fly over and drop chemical explosives on us from great heights. Our shields and weapons are as good or better on the ground, but as often as not they simply won't close with us for that reason. I won't tell you how to get it done, but if you could have that for me in say… a month?” The man winked at him. It was a happy thing that said… Not a lot more than that. The weapons instructor just wasn't sane.
Tor had suspected it for a long time now, this just proved it.
At first he just shook his head. The idea was ridiculous. Just crazy. Except… well, he'd seen a man fly hadn't he? The Count could do it. So could the Austrans apparently. If they could, then why couldn't he build a device for it?
A field that told the smallest portions of a person which direction to move… Well, that could be done. It was a huge field for that type of thing. Vast, which meant it would have to be strong, massively so, but basically, telling the little things to move is all a cutter did. Organize them all in a single direction, say up, harder than the downward force, and the person or object should float. Then move the field, tilting it in the direction you wanted to go to move around…
Finally Kolb shook him and asked him if he was alright. Tor nodded and walked away, not bothering saying anything. He only had a month after all. In a lot of ways this would be way harder than just shielding from things, especially if he wanted to keep it low in energy use, which was pretty much inherent in the idea. If it took too much personal energy the whole thing just wouldn't work. You'd get a few feet in the air and then freeze to death or die of exhaustion.
First he had to test the basic idea itself.
Back in his room he carefully built a small field into a wooden block that simply told it to go up in the air. Tor felt a sense of excitement when he hit the tiny sigil he'd put on the bottom. It floated up, to the ceiling of course and didn't come back down. It wasn't strong enough to make him rise, so he could hold it on the table while deactivating it. Good, it would have been embarrassing trying to explain to Rolph why a block of wood the size of his foot was stuck to their ceiling.
So part one worked. The second part, steering, was harder. Mainly because his initial idea of how to do it was flawed. The idea had made sense, directing the field with his mind, but it proved to be monstrously hard to put into practice. Even spending the rest of the month designing that part, there wouldn't be enough time to get the work done. It had to be rethought which made him sigh. It would have been so cool to direct his flight just by thinking about it like the Count could.
By using a second device, he could tilt the field in any direction at a distance, so that much worked, but he didn't have a clue as to how to pick how high it went or how to control it for a soft set down. It worried at his mind for weeks, as the deadline approached. Tor knew he was living in some kind of odd fugue state by the time he finally understood that all he needed was a simple control over how much upward directed force there was.