Stuart
Adventures Chapter 5
As Stuart steadied himself against the wall of the passage, he realized that, although the floor was soft, the walls were firm beneath his hands. The question was weather he still retained his newly aquired powers in this place. Stuart focused his attention on the wall and tried to think of it as his floor. The effect was so immediate that it startled him. One minute he was standing upright on the boggy floor and the next minute he was standing perpendicular to that with his feet planted firmly on the wall like it was the ground.
From the sounds of the barking he would have only moments to escape the pack and as he looked back to see where they were the effect was so disorienting as to make him stagger. It appeared as though they were racing towards him, clinging to the wall like flies albeit very large and hungry looking. The strange thing is that none of them looked to be of the same breed, they were all muts joined together in an unlikely group. Any one of them would have been easily the biggest dogs Stuart had seen anywhere. The apparently gravity defying dogs filled Stuart with a sense of dread and it took Stuart an act of will to take the few steps toward the pack that was needed for him to retrieve his shoes and then he was off and running away from them faster than he had ever run before.
Within moments he was so far ahead of the dogs that he couldn’t hear them or the alarm anymore, but the fear induced adrenaline was still rushing through his veins so he continued to run for a while longer, putting even more distance between him and his pursuers. Stuart finally stopped and put on his shoes and started thinking about his situation. From what he had been through so far with his entrapment, the floors, and the dogs, he got the distinct impression that this was all some type of test. He wondered what kind of results were expected and who was controlling this test. Stuart decided to try a few tests of his own.
First, he focused on the air between the walls and thought of that as his center of gravity which caused his body to float to that position and hold there as steady as he had ever stood on firm ground. Then he focused his attention ahead of himself to a point down the hall a ways and he immediately began moving towards that spot as though he were falling down a verticle shaft. His speed continued to increase until he reached the spot he had chosen and then he slowed and stopped and began to return to that same spot. It occurred to Stuart that if he changed his area of attention he could continue to go forward and even make direction changes while he was moving. Pretty soon Stuart was flying down the passage as if he had be born with wings. In fact, a couple of times he had to slow down because his speed was faster than his ability to control his course.
As Stuart was moving along, trying to find an end to this ongoing passage, he glimpsed an open portal on his left side and he was going very fast when he passed it, but he thought there was someone standing inside. When he finally came to a stop he turned around to find who or what it was he had seen.