At my insistence, Lia was taking a few yards of rusted, ancient, chainlink fence and making a crude half-dome out of it.

"Is this really necessary?" she complained, scowling as more scales of rust popped off and flecked all over her face and hair as she tried to bend the stubborn metal without snapping it.

"Yes. Especially if you want me to be trying crazy things I might not have full control over."

"Can't you just like, not zap me?"

I gave her a glare and she responded with a half-grin.

After browbeating me about the weight of leadership, she'd steered the conversation back towards what we could do to prepare and remembered that I owed her a demonstration of all of my powers. She was excited about the prospect of brainstorming a few new moves for me, which sounded handy to me. But if I was going to be throwing lightning around, I wanted her safe and sound behind a metal cage that would keep her from getting shocked.

Finally, she was done, and plopped down in the middle of it, shielded entirely from the front by a twisted mass of metal.

"I'm ready! Lightning me!" she called.

"Okay, I finished too." I finished weaving together some grasses into an extremely-improvised rope. I took it closer to her as I tied a slipknot in it.

"You made a noose," she said. "I am already lost. I thought your powers were lightning."

"First thing, there's two parts to my powers, some I use consciously, some subconsciously. From what I've tried, I can't turn the subconscious ones off at all, which is both handy but also dangerous."

I stood a fair distance from the cage and saturated the air around me with energy, creating a field full of arcing lightning, making my hair stand on-end and an casting a flickering effluent glow around me. I liked this one because it made my clothes billow dramatically, pointed my otherwise boring hair straight-up, and cast deep shadows on my face, like some kind of evil wizard. Lia gave an appreciative 'ooohhh' which made me smirk.

"Subconscious power number one! Shockproof. Right now, the very air around me is charged with electric current. Anything near me would be electrocuted, including myself. But this power constantly works to divert electrical current over the surface of my skin instead of through me, making me almost immune to my own, or external electrocution. I can't turn it off, but I can override it by forcing electricity through myself, as I did when I defibrillated myself in Saga's chambers."

I dropped the current and the sparks dissipated and my hair and clothes settled back down to normal.

"Subconscious power number two! Reactive shield! Next to you is a rock. Without leaving the cage, please arc it so that it hits me."

"With pleasure," she grinned. Like the perfect athlete she was, she sent it arcing over her barrier right at me, even seated. As soon as it got close, a bolt of lightning came from nowhere and exploded it into tiny fragments. She gave me a small round of applause, which I probably normally would have thought unnecessary, but was getting into the show here.

"Destroys any small physical objects before they hit me with an explosive electric blast. Objects larger than my head, or of particularly durable material, will still be in dangerous chunks after getting blasted. Bullets, particularly, tend to evaporate into dust, but as you saw with Wilfried and his sniper rifle, if it's too large and moving too fast, it will still explode but then just pierce me with the exploded shrapnel. Basically immune to small-arms fire though."

"Also works on rockets, rapid-fire bullets, and lasers, with even greater effect. When a weapon leaves a distinct trail, like a rocket contrail, or a lazer's oxidized ozone, or even just a stream of bullets from the same source, the lightning can chain down the trail and follow it back to the source, often with explosive or lethal results. Almost all the XPCA I killed were because they fired one of those into my shield and it got them."

"Also, do not ever throw anything at me," I added.

"I'm a little surprised this hasn't happened to us yet," she said.

"Yeah, me too. Should have had this talk sooner."

"Well, keep going, this is good stuff."

"Okay. Final note on the shield, does not work on things fired near me but not at me, or things rolled at me, or anything like that. The shield is pretty particular about what it does and doesn't like."

"Gotcha."

"Subconscious power number three! Restraint immunity." I took the grass noose in my hands and wedged the loose end under a rock, slipping the noose loosely around my wrists.

"I have a noose here, as you mentioned. And as you see, right now it's just loose on my hands. If I tighten it though to the point where it's restraining me...and again, this is up to the particulars of my power to decide what does and doesn't count…"

I wriggled my wrists, pulling the knot tighter and tighter against the rock. Abruptly, an explosion of electricity burst from the air around me and the grass detonated into smoking embers.

"And when my shield decides it's restraining me, it blows up," I said, rubbing my wrists. Again, Lia gave polite applause from inside her cage. "Works on people holding me and handcuffs, I assume prison cells and the like, but at the same time obviously I have no problem being in a closed room or getting a hug."

"Maybe there's a psychosomatic component?"

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning, maybe your power interacts with your mental state. Like if a guy hugs you, that's fine, but if the guy is holding you, the only difference is how you see it in your mind, and that's what your powers react off of."

"Huh, maybe. But even when I was trying to surrender to the XPCA, I was still blowing up restraints."

She shrugged. "You were still being restrained. I didn't say it acts based on whether you're okay with it or not."

"Maybe. Okay, neat. Now every time I get hugged, I'm going to wonder if I think about the wrong thing if it'll blow you up."

"Hugs are totally worth it."

I blushed a little, my mind involuntarily going back to the last hug I had from Karu. "That's about it for my subconscious powers. We ready for the good stuff?"

I waved my arms with a dramatic flourish and then conjured four swords, one after another, of pure lightning, crackling like a fissure in reality. I spun them around me dramatically, gave a few stabs at nothingness and then posed with them spinning in the air behind me.

"Conscious power number one! Blades of lightning!"

No applause for that one. Too much showing off?

"Already seen it. And you can only make four? And only one at a time?"

"No, I can make all of them at once, I was just showing off."

"This is a demo not a cabaret. Boo. Zero points awarded."

"Thanks, AEGIS," I said, rolling my eyes. "Let's see if I can do more than four…"

I tensed or flexed or concentrated or whatever it was I was doing, but more. It was hard to do, having no real idea how I was doing it to begin with, except that I wanted it to happen so it did. I felt a lot of stupid expressions crossing my face as I worked at it and tried not to be embarrassed. I mean, how many lightnings could Lia make?

After a few minutes of no results, Lia spoke up. "Okay, change of strategy. How do you make these when you're trying to whip them out to begin with?"

"I don't know. I just...want them to do something, and they do it."

"Okay. Put your stuff away, I'm coming out." She walked out of the cage and rummaged around the ground a bit and then came back with an armful of rocks. She put five of them in a circle around me, making me feel like I was now some kind of summoned demon. She sat back down.

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"Okay, now make a blade on top of one of those rocks."

Easy. I looked at the rock and willed a lightning blade into being.

"Now the next. And the next. Keep going."

I went around the circle, willing them into existence one after another. When I reached the fifth stone, I did the same thing, and another bolt came into being, just like the others. I had to do a double-take to make sure none of the others went out, but sure enough, there were now five swords in a circle around me. Lia grinned, pleased as punch.

"Wow, you're amazing," I said.

"Can you do six?"

"Uhh," I tried to reproduce the feeling of pulling the blade out of nothing, but nothing came. "Hmm." I shifted the blades out of the way and started over on the first rock again, but again no result.

"Start over from zero, but every time you make one, put it away and keep moving."

I turned all my swords off, and then started over. I made a blade and then moved it into the air above me. Turned, and repeated. Turned, and repeated. Again, and again, and again...and again? How many was I at? I looked up. Nine?

"Nine," Lia said. "Keep going!" I tried to pick up where I stopped but nothing happened. There was some very particular trick to making them past a point, and I could only do it if I kept doing it, like each blade was harder to make than the one before, but easy to make if that's all I was doing. I started over.

A minute later, I was actually getting dizzy from spinning. "Okay, you can stop," Lia laughed.

"How many?" I asked. I'd been spinning and making blades nonstop for a while now.

"If I didn't lose track, which I might have, I think a hundred and fifty-three?"

I looked up and was surprised to see just a mass of crackling, indistinguishable electrical mess hovering above me. Experimentally, I willed them into motion, and to my delight, they moved easily, all of them. I didn't have fine control over them all, but could get them all to strike or withdraw at once, could weave them into elaborate patterns, or surround myself with a very, very sweet cage of death, as easily as I could move four of them. By focusing on a few of them at a time, I could still exercise full control, while the rest kind of hung out.

I put myself into a simulated fight, angled half the blades up and down, and half outwards in a circle around me, and had them spin around me rapidly, like a huge, shining sawblade. I turned and struck behind me, six or seven of the blades temporarily jumping from the spinning pattern to slash out at the imagined enemy before rejoining the halo of death.

"This is sick," Lia crooned.

"Super sick," I agreed. I lashed out a few more times and then changed up the pattern, making two spinning shields on my sides, brimming with blades and flashing menacingly. I punched the air before me with a straight right jab, and the shield on my right followed, extending as the blades arranged from a half-sphere into a lance, stretching to the very edge of my power's range, before snapping back into formation.

"Super duper sick," Lia added.

"Yeah, I like this. I need to practice getting more out faster. If I can figure out the trick to how I pop four out at once, and get hundreds? Oh man."

"In theory," she began, and then stopped, looking at my face. "What?"

"Nothing!" I said.

"Spit it out, stupid big brother."

"It's just every time you start a sentence with 'in theory,' I'm always about to be really impressed. It just makes me smile."

"You are a stupid big brother," she said, rolling her eyes. "Anyway, in theory, your powers should give you absolute control over anything electrical within a certain distance. That's the crux of how all powers work that we know of, it's just manipulation of one specific thing, and a certain area. How exactly you choose to manifest it is up to you and your personality."

"So, in theory, I could have a bulletproof shield at the edge of my radius instead of just a foot from me?"

"In theory, the whole area around you could be full of swords, hundreds of layers of shields, crackling with electricity, and automatically surging out to shoot at anything your subconsciousness doesn't like. I don't know if that's actually possible, since your superpower gland or whatever it is that makes Exhumans Exhuman might have limitations we don't know of...but the fact that you could poop out a hundred fifty something swords indicates you have a lot of untapped power."

She gave her hair a little toss. "Anything less than that is just a mental hiccup, you should be able to improve by training."

I grinned. "Well, by your logic, how do you explain this?" I formed a small thumb-sized lightning bulb and held it dramatically aloft. "Conscious power number two, bulb of thunder!" I threw it so it would explode on the ground right in front of the cage, and tendrils of lightning erupted from the impact site, arcing everywhere, like one of those hippy plasma lamps. Lia leaned back as lightning surged into the cage around her, arcing and sparking everywhere.

"And, you'll note, outside of my radius," I proclaimed.

"Yeah, well, lightning does exist, you know. You're not Thor. You don't have a monopoly on electricity."

"You lost me at 'you're not Thor.'," I said.

She sighed. "Look, that terrapath you fought, she was chucking rocks at you all over, but you said she had a kill zone where once you were inside, her attacks got super dangerous."

"Yeah. That was her radius, the rest were just thrown rocks."

"Well, you're just throwing lightning. After it's out of your radius, it becomes normal lightning. I mean, not exactly normal, it looks like some kind of ball lightning by the way you're packing it up before you throw it, but that's the jist of it."

"You're really just comparing my bulbs to throwing rocks?"

"Bulb is a terrible name for that attack. It makes it sound like you're throwing tulips."

"I thought it was like a light bulb." I spawned one in my hand and looked at it. I guess it was more like a ball than a bulb, if ball lightning was what I actually was making.

"Hmm," I said. "Okay, conscious power number two, ball lightning!" I formed an orb of lightning in my palm and threw it dramatically, but...not at Lia this time. Instead of darting off at the speed of light, it sailed slowly through the air, drifting like a deflated balloon until it hit the ground and sizzled, dissipating into a carpet of shocking ground.

"What the heck was that?" I said, staring at the pathetic display. "That wasn't anything like my lightning bulb!"

"I told you already," Lia said. "Any difference in how the lightning works is in your head. Obviously you have different connotations in your brain between how a bulb or a ball would behave, so when you're making and managing them, they'll behave differently."

"So...just by giving something a different name, it'll behave differently? That doesn't make any sense."

"Ugh. Okay, mental exercise. I'm going to say a phrase, and...yeah actually, don't tell me how you feel, just think about it, and try to realize how your feelings are different. Okay?"

"Sure."

"AEGIS."

"Okay," I said. My mind flashed to AEGIS, thinking of the last time we walked together in Rua.

"Now, AEGIS cleavage."

"Lia," I groaned.

"Nope. Think about it."

If she insisted. God knows I'd seen enough of that teasing little valley in all they months we'd been living together. How she'd lean forward when focused, and all but flash me. I felt heat in my cheeks and a stupid grin was on my face before I realized Lia was staring right at it with one eyebrow in serious danger of becoming lost forever in her tangle of hair.

"Wow, you are such a perv. AEGIS was right."

"Hey, this was your stupid thought experiment!"

"Anyway, you notice that even though you were thinking of the same thing, your brain had two entirely different reactions? Now if your subconscious brain were in charge of reality, you'd have two very different versions of AEGIS running around. Thankfully, you can't run around making lewd copies of her to your heart's content, but you can make lightning."

"And the context my brain puts on the lightning affects how it comes out?"

"That's my theory."

"So if I decide to…" I closed my eyes and focused lightning into my hands, creating an indescribable form, coursing with power. "Conscious power number three! INFINITE ANNIHILATOR DIVINATION: CRYING GOD'S ELECTROCUTIONER MONSOON!"

Lia's eyes went wide as the powers in my hands grew and grew, I felt my hair stand on end and my clothes billowed as shocking pulses flared from my hands and the enormous sphere of glowing energy within them. With a kiai from the pit of my diaphragm, I stomped and let loose the dragon within me, throwing forward my arms and unleashing the charged power.

It arced out from my hands like one of my lightning bulbs, but a bit bigger, saturating everything within a couple feet of me with tendrils of lightning over about half a second. Like, lightning noodles, I guess.

"What the fuck, that was so lame!" I shouted. Lia fell over, laughing.

"I thought if I gave an incredibly cool name to my attack, it would automatically be incredibly cool!" I explained. She couldn't respond, she was crying from laughing now, banging her fist against her thigh, and then rolling onto her back.

"You said names affect the attack! It should have worked!"

"Oh...oh...god, my sides!" she gasped, still laughing her ass fully off. "My face...hurts...so bad...oh my god, it was so bad!" She bust up again.

"You are so mean," I said walking over and crouching next to her manic, rolling form. "Seriously it was not that funny."

"You looked so serious!" she squeaked out, between laughing fits. "And then...it...it…" she broke down again. "IT WAS SO AWFUL!"

"Damn it, Lia," I said her contagious laughter catching. "You are the meanest sister ever."

"Can't...breathe! Too...funny!"

It was a few minutes before she regained any sense of composure. She kept almost coming back and then looking at my face and breaking down laughing all over again. It went from funny to annoying to looping all the way back 'round to being really funny all over again. Finally, both of us were lying in the grass panting and saying 'ow ow' as we held our pained faces and ribs.

"Hoo, we really need to work on your powers," Lia said. "E-especially that...that last one," she said, almost getting it out without giggling.

"So mean," I said with a grin. "I've got one more to show you, and then want to brainstorm?"

"Sure, sounds good," she said, and took a deep breath, resuming her position in the cage.