He worked with gusto, and regularly overstepped his new abilities without properly thinking things through. When creating a ball that would never stop bouncing, he added too much bounce. After the ball hit the ground, it rocketed up to the sky with such force that it could easily have traveled to Mars.
In another experiment he tried to make a young cat stay forever kitten-size. First, he accidentally shrunk the animal to the size of a microbe, then overcompensated. A regular-sized kitten is cute, but one that is twelve feet tall is a problem. The cat tried to eat Petrov and the bear repeatedly, even after being returned to a normal size.
This was all a welcome diversion for the village, a chance to laugh again. But North was not the type to take setbacks in stride. He fumed for days whenever things didn’t go as he’d intended. Sometimes these angry moods would cause small catastrophes. Furniture would burst into flames, or very small thunderclouds (usually no bigger than a pillow) would follow North around until he calmed.
