I got a bit full of myself and told my friend I’d be doing a card trick but performed it using telekinesis. He totally loved it, which made me feel great.
However, afterward he pestered me quite persistently to reveal how I did it, and I became really troubled for an answer. Finally giving in, I confessed to him that I did it with telekinesis, but since I had previously declared it to be a card trick, he didn’t believe me and only thought I was saying that to get him off my back. Then I showed him my actual telekinesis, but he ended up thinking that to be a trick as well. I found myself in quite the tough spot.
Something told me that the more I tried to prove myself to him, the more obsessed he would get about it, so I dodged his questions with something random and then made a run for it. The next day, when he started pestering me to show it to him again, I told him that my mom accidentally threw my rigged cards away and stuck to that story. Then I swore to myself to never use telekinesis in front of someone else ever again. Telekinesis will forever remain a personal hobby. Showing it to other people is just so tiring...
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So then, as my telekinetic output increased, I ran out of things to move with my mind. I upgraded from rice cooker to bookshelf. From bookshelf to fridge. Then from fridge to car. After moving the buses at the nearby bus depot for four months, I began to feel the effectiveness of even that waning.
I realized something. Namely, that in this world, it’s actually quite hard to find things that heavy just lying around.
Generally, a bus is about 6 to 8 tons. I’m sure a house is heavier than that, and a skyscraper is even heavier. But I couldn’t very well go around lifting up things fixed into the ground. I considered moving trains, but I could imagine how catastrophic things could get if I used telekinesis to move a train in motion, and it was beyond my ability to sneak into a train depot.
Having no other choice, I put a temporary halt on increasing the output and focused instead on duration, precision, and breadth of application. The way I saw it, having an output of around 7 tons as a base was more than enough to work with.
So the first thing I trained was vectors. I wanted to be able to move in all directions, be it front, back, up, down, left, or right. Back at the very start, I felt a slight response when I tried initiating horizontal movement, so I thought the chances of success were rather high. And when I gave it a try, it turned out quite well. Aside from pulling and pushing, I found myself capable of exerting 2 to 3 kg in all other directions.
Perhaps because I was using my telekimuscle in a way that I hadn’t before, the telekinetic pain the next day was way worse than what I’d had for a long time.
Because I trained my fundamentals first, my mastery over the other vectors proceeded much smoother than I had expected. A mere three months later, I had become capable of exerting the full 7 tons in all directions.
But the price of that was a rumor going around of buses flying in the dead of night as if they were possessed. The moment I heard that rumor, cold sweat flowed down my back like a waterfall. Apparently I had been seen. So that was it for moving buses.
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Around the time I had mastered all vectors, I started my third year of high school. I wasn’t that worried about not being able to make my livelihood, so I just chose an industrial school on the lower half of the spectrum that suited my academic ability. It was true that aiming for a research position in physics would have been the most relevant in light of my research into my own telekinesis, but to be frank, I wasn’t that bright. My scores were above the median line, but I didn’t have the brains to come up with something revolutionary.
As I steadily made progress in my exam preparation, I also steadily made progress in my telekinetic training. By this point in time, it had completely become a hobby of mine. I kinda felt like I had grown to use telekinesis as a break between study sessions to refresh myself.
So, after mastering all vectors, the next thing I aimed for was the opposite of “to move”: “to stop.”
Up till then, I’d been using telekinesis only to move things, such as “drawing” to me or “pushing” away, but I was sure that it could be used for the opposite as well. Such as fixing in place something that was flying in the air, or stopping a ball that was rolling down a slope. Making the telekinesis “stall” could be another way to put it.
But now this, it was hard. If what I’d been doing thus far was straightforward, like lifting dumbbells, this felt awkwardly difficult, like doing the invisible chair exercise. When I lost focus, the stopping power gradually dissipated. It would feel easy to do at the start, but with the passage of time, I would feel my telekimuscle quivering and screaming for release. But by training it up, I’d be able to gain pink(?) telekimuscle with much more explosive power and endurance. It wasn’t like gaining them would have changed anything for me, but guys are creatures that pursue muscles even when it’s meaningless. Muscles are status.
So I lifted my desk while studying. I lifted the chair that I was sitting in while practicing my English listening comprehension. I lifted my dad’s car while solving past exam questions.
For someone doing both studying and telekinesis training at the same time, both my grades and telekimuscle grew at a steady rate. Well, y’know, it’s like those who do sports while they study. Just as there are people who become unable to focus on studying when there’s music in the background, there are people who can focus better on studying while listening to music. In my case, it’s just that telekinesis and studying turned out to be a good fit.
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Spending my summer vacation stupidly earnestly studying and practicing telekinesis for twelve hours every single day paid off. I managed to get an evaluation of “A” for my preferred university, and it also no longer tired me out to activate my telekimuscle’s endurance and fixation power the entire time. Though I confess those overnighters really might have been a bit much.
Both my teacher and parents recommended that I aim for a university one rank higher, but I managed to turn them down with random reasoning. The university one rank higher was not near an ocean. So anyways, as long as I didn’t commit some huge blunder on my university entrance exams, I was set.
While watching my elegant friends, who had spent their summer leisurely now attacking their books with not so elegant faces, I was able to submerge myself in my hobby for a while.