"Dude, you think things through how often?" Luke shook his head. "Don't you insist that that's part of your charm or something?" Mao was right on one point, though - Luke's "magic Jedi space bubble" probably would've kept him safe. Even without the last month to practice, Luke was getting really good at deflecting things that were thrown at him, so if Mao had thrown the crab at him, it was Mao who probably would've been in trouble as a result.
As Mao began to dry himself out in the hot sun, Luke picked up some more sand and continued to make it float "magically" between his palms. It took a lot of concentration to keep them there, and sometimes he'd try to make cool little shapes out the floating grains. This didn't work too well, of course, but Luke had found that, like art, practicing with his powers was one of those things that could just miraculously focus on with laser-like intensity. Since he still lacked a lot of control, though, he eventually gave up on the sand art and instead, glancing over at Mao with a mischievous smile, manipulated his field so that a few grains of sand shot off toward the other boy. The controlled effort was kind of a success in that some of the sand did go in the right direction, but the rest of the sand more or less collapsed into his hands when the energy was diverted. Clearly he'd have to practice more to get this multiple-field thing to work right.